


Gestalt & Good Form

by AnimalDecay



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Architects, Architects, Drama, Family Drama, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, New York City, Romance, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Unresolved Emotional Tension, because no one knows how to communicate their feelings in a healthy way, edelweiss, everyone is white collar AF, so much tension, the gayest architecture office on the east coast
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27864902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnimalDecay/pseuds/AnimalDecay
Summary: In the longer history of architecture and the arts, there was always some distance to bridge between an idea and its manifestation. In the shorter history, Ludwig Beilschmidt wasn't sure if hiring an old friend would cause more problems than it solved, or solve more problems than he'd been aware of—but if nothing else, it would certainly keep things interesting. [SwissAus AU]
Relationships: Austria/Switzerland (Hetalia), Germany/North Italy (Hetalia), Minor South Italy/Spain, Minor or Background Relationship(s), minor Finland/Sweden - Relationship, minor austria/turkey, past Austria/Hungary - Relationship, past austria/everyone actually, past netherlands/switzerland
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. Words

_Recommended listening: “Babylon” by David Gray_

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** **Words  
** **_Worte_ **

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Most of the time, life was pretty serendipitous.

Ludwig Beilschmidt pondered that as he stepped out of his West Village apartment and made his way east toward Washington Street, on a crystalline Tuesday morning in late September 2011.

Ludwig liked to think he knew a thing or two about serendipity, enjoying that winning intersection of traits that people who thrived in New York City often did: youth, good looks, financial stability, and occupational success. He was closing out thirty (nothing to worry about yet). He was blessed with tall, blonde, sturdy German genes. He was engaged to an Italian fashion designer who came from very old money, and whom he loved deeply in spite of said money. And he, among all of these things, had spent the better part of the past decade nurturing his greatest calling and pride and joy—his very own architecture firm—to thriving life on a quaint block in utterly-gentrified Tribeca, Great Recession of 2008 be damned.

And sure, things weren’t always perfect. The day-to-day of cultivating a life and a business in the center of the universe was hectic and messy and generally quite demanding. Ludwig had lots to worry about all the time, between keeping his business running smoothly, keeping his clients and his employees and his fiancé happy, managing the logistics of traveling abroad five or six times per year, picking up his dry-cleaning (he should really just start getting it delivered, but he wasn’t sure he trusted his doorman with such a critical percentage of his wardrobe), finding gray hairs (at _thirty!_ ), and the impending doom of climate change—which he felt a little guilty about because he flew first class. But he was a businessman, and if he had to endure wearing a suit while strapped into a prison of an airplane eight hours at a time every other month, then by God he _deserved_ first class.

He was just grateful that he didn’t have to do any of it alone.

Though he was its founder and the project essentially his brainchild, Ludwig was actually one-third of the ownership of his company, Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects. The other two-thirds were made up of his totally psychotic brother, Gilbert—who was quite competent in the financial and logistical areas of the business when one got past the arresting force of nature that he so often personified—and Francis Bonnefoy, who he’d met through said brother, and with whom he’d developed quite a close working relationship over the years. Francis was quick with his tongue both by day and, allegedly, by night (though he remained an eternal bachelor, and Ludwig remained eternally confused); he knew just how to say the unsayable; and he had some uncanny sixth sense for when it was necessary to order office pizza, which some days was the only thing that kept the whole operation glued together at all.

Quite possibly the best part about his business, though, was the location, and the fact that the location had led him into some love that he had not previously imagined possible. Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects occupied the top three floors of a lovely, classic, pre-war Manhattan building, cast-iron-faced and painted white and powder blue, that sat at the intersection of Duane and Staple Streets in the heart of Tribeca. Directly below B&B’s three stories, on the building’s second floor, was his fiancé’s studio VARGAS, and that arrangement was how they’d come to meet—running into each other, quite literally, as they entered and exited the building—in those first fragile years of cultivating their respective careers. The aforementioned ‘old money’ meant that VARGAS was really more of a way to pass time than anything, and so Ludwig’s dear Feliciano could, and did, pop up into his office at most any hour of the day, and bother him when he was busy, and eat lunch in his office while rambling on about nothing at all to provide a welcome backdrop of insufferable noise against which Ludwig could focus. They could even walk home together when Ludwig wasn’t working late. And _that_ , certainly, was not only serendipitous, but also quite wonderful.

So Ludwig Beilschmidt took each day as it came, and ran his business as best he could, uncorked one of Feliciano’s vintage _barolo_ s when he had to, stubbornly continued to pick up his own dry-cleaning, and paid his carbon offsets at the end of every year. And things were good, that way. He had much to be happy about.

As it was, Ludwig was strolling down to Caffe Dante on MacDougal Street on one of those crisp, early autumn mornings where the sun seemed to rise forever. The sky was a deep, rich blue behind the towering cityscape, with nary a cloud in sight, and the steep angle of the light cast long shadows over the Village as it filtered down between the stately blocks of townhouses he passed. It was a rare walk for him, leaving home well after nine and not going directly to work, and he was glad to take in some scenery that did not conform to the muscle memory of his daily commute. He was more glad, still, to feel that he’d reached a point in his career where he could afford a morning like this one, without the threat of his business imploding into chaos after an hour or two of his absence.

Ludwig dodged an upturned trash can and its scattered contents expertly, and pondered the curious circumstances that had caused this deviation from his normal routine.

It was the product of a single email, actually.

_FROM: vash.zwingli712@mail.com  
_ _SENT: 5 September 2011 03:57am EDT  
_ _TO: lbeilschmidt@beilschmidtbonnefoy.com  
_ _SUBJECT: coffee?_

_Ludwig—_

_Vash Zwingli here. remember me? I saw your face on the homepage of dezeen a couple weeks ago and thought it was a shame we lost touch. I hope America is good, it sounds like it is. ‘The gayest architecture office on the east coast’, I guess you’re carrying on the legacy of ABK 2004, ja? I would make a joke about Gropius, but I realize that, Harvard is not so close to you. (Gropius was probably also not gay, but you never know.)_

_anyways, I’m in New York City this month, any chance you want to catch up over a coffee?_

_let me know_

_VG  
_ _VZ_

The email was right, it really _had_ been a long time. It was funny, too, how the written word so belied the voice of the person who sent it—university-era inside jokes aside—and how much it sounded just like the Vash he didn’t quite realize he remembered in such clarity.

Vash Zwingli. How strange it was to hear from him again, perhaps stranger still that he hadn’t in so many years. Vash, from Basel (or was it Bern?) had been one of Ludwig’s closest friends in university, back before Ludwig had moved to the United States and Vash had snagged one of those ever-coveted positions at architectural megafirm IDA—in Hamburg, of all places. They’d been two of a small handful of students in the accelerated architecture program at the _Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste_ , in Stuttgart, combining a Bachelors, Masters, two required internships, and professional certification into just five years—five years that Ludwig remembered fondly as a time in his life where he’d slept maybe one of every three nights.

Ludwig remembered Vash, specifically, as perhaps the smartest person in the program, bitingly dry and humble to a fault. He could, Ludwig recalled, come across as prickly, and he tended to be short-tempered, but Ludwig had never minded any of that so much because the sentiment always seemed genuine. Vash was the kind of person who didn’t smile when he didn’t mean it, but when he did, rare as the occasion was, there was no question of whether it was sincere. The two of them had been equally studious in nature, and had taken a mutually level-headed, rational approach to all things life and work, and so they had become fast friends. They’d challenged one another’s Friday night ambitions, clothing choices, and tastes in music, sure, but they shared a common dedication to built space, and that was plenty for them.

Of course, Ludwig mused as he crossed 7th on Bleecker, it was not possible to reflect on his time in school, nor the friendship he’d had with Vash, without also accounting for one Roderich Edelstein.

Because Roderich was really the lynchpin of the whole thing: in school, he was the third member of their little trio, was Vash’s flatmate in the university-allocated dorms, and now—having moved to America at the same time as Ludwig—occupied the position of senior architect at Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy. And if Vash Zwingli was one of the smartest people Ludwig knew, Roderich Edelstein certainly made a formidable rival. Like Feliciano Vargas, he sported an aristocratic upbringing, but unlike Feliciano he was all sorts of messed up from his emphatic rejection of it. Ludwig always felt, in the most complimentary way possible, that Roderich’s childhood spent in deeply Catholic, high-society Vienna had rubbed something _very_ Freudian into him that he’d never quite outrun. Roderich was a gifted musician and a contradictory, complicated man with a mind for all things design, a taste for culinary fineries and the unsubtle art of melodrama, and charisma to outshine it all. To that last point, Ludwig had found in their years of working together that it made some tangible difference in the atmosphere of a conference room to position his friend right in front, whether he was actually driving the meeting or not.

Roderich was also, in some ways or maybe many, the reason that Ludwig had so long been out of touch with his old friend Vash—but he didn’t have time to get into _that_ whole matter now.

Ludwig broke from his thoughts as he made a right onto MacDougal, the green awnings of his destination emerging down the block. He stepped into the bustling restaurant five minutes early, searching for a familiar face (would it be as familiar as the email, after all this time?) and upon finding none, asking the hostess about a spot for two for coffee. She sat him at the bar past the door, put two menus down in front of him, and he waited.

Not for long, though. Vash walked through the door one minute and fifty-five seconds early, and Ludwig recognized him just about instantly.

In many ways, he _did_ look a lot like Ludwig remembered: the same stern green eyes, the same straw-colored hair—which he was apparently still letting grow past his chin—and the same brusque clip to his step as he entered the space. But despite those similarities, he gave the immediate impression of having really come into his own, and Ludwig realized that all his memories of Vash were memories of someone who could be called a boy—while this Vash, here, was most certainly a man. His height would never match Ludwig’s, but he was well-built, and didn’t by a long margin give off any sense of being scrawny. He had also apparently elevated his sartorial sensibility since they’d last spoke: he wore slimming black, from form-fitting turtleneck to dark leather Chelsea boots peeking out from the cuffs of his pants—save for a boxy, utilitarian-looking jacket the color of olives, which Ludwig identified only because of Feliciano to be a French style. Vash looked good, _really_ good, and Ludwig was glad to feel the immediate impression that the years they’d been out of contact had treated him well.

Vash scanned the room for a moment before spotting his old friend, raising a couple fingers in greeting and making his way toward the seat that was set aside for him.

“ _Grüessech_ ,” Vash said first, and extended an arm. “Ludwig Beilschmidt. Long time no see.”

Ludwig stood to shake his hand, surprised when—he wasn’t sure who initiated it—they hugged briefly, a little awkwardly in their years of separation.

“It’s good to see you, Vash,” Ludwig replied, pretty sure that he meant it.

“Likewise.” Vash made to remove his jacket and hung it on the hook beneath the bar. A waiter came to take their orders—for Ludwig, a cappuccino; for Vash, an iced latte.

“I am constantly impressed,” Vash said once the waiter had left, “with how much ice Americans put in their coffee.”

That was effectively the first thing Vash had said to him in seven years, and it was probably meant to be a joke, Ludwig realized belatedly. He wordlessly hoped that the whole morning wouldn’t fall as flat as the first attempt.

Vash eyed him for a long moment, as if to study the silence before trying again. “Actually, I like your shirt. It’s very…”

Ludwig couldn’t suppress a self-conscious cringe quickly enough to just take the compliment at face value. “Ah, _ja_. My fiancé—he’s a fashion designer and he likes to make me his, er, test subject, sometimes.”

Vash cocked his head a few degrees, and the corners of his mouth tipped upward slightly, slyly. “I was going to say ‘ _Schutzstaffel_ ’, but maybe I should just say ‘high fashion’?” Then he cringed, too. “God, sorry, that’s actually not how I meant to start—” But Ludwig cracked a wry smile.

“No, no, you’re probably right,” he shrugged, pinching a piece of the fabric between two fingers. “Especially when I wear it. But I think here in America you’d say it’s ‘WASP-y’.”

“Ah. Sure.” Vash relaxed visibly in his chair as their drinks were placed in front of them, and he flicked one noncommittal hand while picking up the coffee in the other. “You Americans and your… words.” He held his glass up to his face, inspecting what Ludwig could only assume was the coffee-to-ice ratio. “But, America. How is it? How have you—oh,” he interrupted himself, “you said ‘fiancé’? Congratulations.”

Ludwig took a sip of his cappuccino and nodded as he swallowed.

“Thank you, yes, his name is Feliciano. He’s… uh, he’s very Italian. And old money—” Damn, that probably sounded like bragging. He quickly made to cover it: “We got engaged in July, you know, with that being legal here, finally, the timing seemed good.” But Vash hadn’t missed a word, and his eyes glinted cheekily.

“Independently wealthy _and_ Italian? Ludwig, Ludwig—not everyone gets so lucky, you know.”

Ludwig knew. “I feel lucky. Really, very lucky.”

“Good. _Ja_ , and somehow America got ahead of Switzerland and Germany there, so you can count me surprised. Although I think _die Schweizer_ have the excuse of being more Catholic, at least.” Vash shrugged, and paused for another sip. “When is the wedding?”

“Well New York is only the sixth state out of fifty, most of this country is still completely backwards—anyway, it’s in January.” Vash nodded.

“January is a good month for that, people like a celebration in the middle of winter.”

Ludwig smiled inwardly at the line of thought. “That was kind of the idea, yes—and all our friends are just scrambling to get married, now, so in the summer it was going to be impossible to schedule something that didn’t overlap with someone else’s.”

Vash nodded again. “And the business?” he asked. “Sounds like it’s really…” He seemed to choose his next words carefully. “Taken off.”

“It has,” Ludwig answered. “We went through a pretty major period of growth in the third year and have held steady since, even through the recession, thankfully. And we’re growing again, now, a bit more modestly.”

“That’s really great to hear.” And Ludwig wasn’t quite sure why he was a little surprised that the assessment sounded genuine. “If I can ask, _bitte_ , growing how?”

“Well, we just hired a new research assistant, and, actually, we’re looking to hire on a second person in a senior architectural role. You can see where we’re trying to alleviate pressure, I mean, there’s just too much work now for only—um, for Roderich, so…”

An odd look flickered over Vash’s face. “I see.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Talk about long time. He’s still working with you?”

“ _Ja_ , he—well, you know, he’s been a really vital figure in the whole thing—” _God, hopefully that didn’t sound backhanded._ Ludwig shrugged noncommittally, but wasn’t sure that made it better. “—so it’s good to have him around.”

No perceivable offense taken at the remark, Vash only nodded. “ _Aber ja_. I didn’t see him in that article so I wasn’t sure…”

“Yeah, no, he just wasn’t interested, I guess. Something about being too busy.”

“Sure.” Vash’s eyes narrowed slightly, a little sheepishly, then, as if they were broaching a topic they weren’t meant to. He cocked his head and gave Ludwig a sideways glance, burying his question in his coffee as he picked up the glass again. “So is he… still married?”

They probably _weren’t_ meant to, actually; suddenly Ludwig’s generally good sense of discretion was thrown askew, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

“Erm, no.” He laughed uncomfortably, feeling a little sheepish himself. “Not for a long time. I mean, you know,” aware that Vash likely _didn’t_ know, but maybe could have guessed, “it only lasted for about a year. And then he did come out, finally, and—” He stopped himself. “You know, I’m actually not sure I’m really the right person to be talking about this.”

Vash waved a hand again—“All in confidence.”—which did little to quell Ludwig’s unease about the general direction of the conversation, but nevertheless he divulged the rest of his thought to his old friend.

“Well, yes. So, he came out, and then got divorced, and as far as I know, he hasn’t spoken with his parents since. Although,” he added, “he and Elizabeta are on good enough terms now, they still talk.”

Vash hummed in thought, not looking particularly surprised at any of it. “What’s that thing you used to say? ‘ _Das Leben ist wei eine Hühnerleiter_ ’ or something, right?”

“ _Ja_ , I mean, my _Opa_ used to say that, but I guess that’s right,” Ludwig agreed. Looking to steer the conversation elsewhere as quickly as possible, he probed his own curiosities about the man before him.

“So, what brings you to New York? Business? Your email was kind of cryptic.”

Vash shook his head. “ _Naja_ … not business, exactly. Lilli is starting university here, actually, at NYU—you remember Lilli?”

Ludwig did indeed remember Lilli, Vash’s very sweet little sister and near-doppelgänger. He remembered Vash looking after her closely through their time in school, and he’d always admired the immense energy Vash put into keeping her happy and healthy and safe, despite the pressure of their academic program. If Ludwig felt he hadn’t slept enough through those years, surely that paled in comparison to Vash, who had taken on the role of full-time parent in addition to full-time student when he was eighteen and she just six years old, after their mother and father had passed away suddenly and he’d waged an uphill battle to keep her with him—emerging, against all odds, victorious.

“Of course I do,” he said, “but college, seriously? I mean, if that’s not a marker of how much time flies—”

“Yeah, I know—” Vash’s voice lifted with an enthusiasm that Ludwig found decidedly wholesome. “It is honestly _crazy_. It’s like, she’s really become her own person, you know?” He smiled, finally, and his features brightened fondly, “I mean, she is old enough now that all the time I spent trying to get her to like good music seems to be wasted, but…”

“Well, you probably started on the wrong foot with the Pinback,” Ludwig teased, and Vash scoffed in mock offense.

“How dare you say a _word_ against Pinback, they absolutely hold up!”

They both laughed, the moment recalling the banter they used to exchange about musical tastes between studying for exams and working on projects. There had been lots of those moments, back then, the ones which had forged their friendship; in this one, the atmosphere of the entire cafe seemed to soften, like the air had taken a great sigh of relief. Ludwig breathed with it, and realized that a tightness in his chest he hadn’t really realized was there had loosened. Vash continued to speak, seemingly emboldened by the conversation’s turn.

“I mean I can’t believe that after all these years, you’re still sitting here, trying to tell me that Pinback is _not_ the greatest band to ever grace the earth, really—”

Ludwig stiffened privately, the previous moment wiped away, and he thought without his own conscious permission that perhaps ‘after all these years,’ as Vash had said, it was maybe a little late to be taking offense to such a thing, even as a joke.

He didn’t say that, though. It wouldn’t have done anyone any good, not when they were finally breaking some ice. And it didn’t really matter, anyway. It had been a long time ago. Surely they’d all moved on.

“Okay, okay, fine,” he said instead, nudging the conversation along again. “So how much longer are you here then, if you’re helping Lilli settle in?”

“Well, actually…” Vash pinched a piece of hair between his fingers and examined it, a strange expression on his face. “I’m staying here too. I thought I could use a change of scenery, you know. We’re staying in an AirBnB now, and we’re looking for an apartment, which is a little difficult because Lil started classes two weeks ago. And we’re working on the resident-thing—we’re trying to get green cards but she has a student visa and I’m authorized to work, for now.”

“ _Moving_ here?” _Hadn’t he said…_ “In your email you only said you’d be here—actually, I guess you didn’t really say how long.”

“I know, I know. It just sounded weird to say all that in an email, you know?”

Ludwig thought about it for a moment, and conceded that Vash was maybe right.

“I suppose,” he shrugged. “ _Herzlich willkommen_ to you and Lilli, then. So are you going to be at IDA’s New York office?” Vash blinked, and then shook his head.

“Oh, no. I left IDA a couple years ago.”

“Ah, they don’t make you sign your life away to them when you start?”

Vash let out a huff of laughter, but rolled his eyes. “Well, kind of. I had this brutal two-year—ah, you call it a ‘no-compete’?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, so I decided I would wait out that time and get another degree, because I basically couldn’t work _anywhere_. And I just finished that in the spring in Rotterdam. And I was doing this freelance ‘consulting’ thing—” He quirked two fingers of his free hand into air quotes. “—which is exactly as stupid as it sounds, but Lilli and I had to eat.”

“So, you’re a doctor now? Or have you decided architecture isn’t for you anymore?”

Vash’s eyes glinted, and he leaned in conspiratorially. “Doctor. But the best part is, I don’t want to teach at _all_.”

It was Ludwig’s turn to roll his eyes. “Trust you, of all people, to get a PhD just for the hell of it.”

Vash shrugged. He offered a small smile and sipped at his coffee again. “The bragging rights are very worth it so far, anyway,” he muttered, which earned a snort from Ludwig.

“Well, congratulations on the bragging rights. So, if not IDA, and not teaching, where are you working now that you’re here?”

“Ah.” Vash hesitated for a moment. “God, I hope this doesn’t sound weird—” And Ludwig braced himself for… he wasn’t really sure what, actually, what kind of answer could be _that_ weird? A competitor? “—but I’m actually kind of a free agent, right now. I talked with a few places so far, and just didn’t care much for any of them.”

“Mmm.” Ludwig thought about that for a moment, and blinked as he realized what Vash was saying between the words he’d actually verbalized. “ _Oh._ Actually, maybe…” The word _serendipity_ poked at the back of his mind again. “Well, we’ve interviewed several people for this position at my office as well, and they’ve all been fine but Roderich is so picky, he just hasn’t liked any of them at all—”

“So he’s like the same person he always was,” Vash interjected bluntly.

“In that regard.” Ludwig rubbed two fingers against his temple as he considered this new possibility. It was a dangerous thing to even suggest, in some ways, though none of those dangers had ever seemed to get in the way of their ability to work together. At least, not right up until—

“Hey,” Vash interrupted Ludwig’s thoughts, voice now laced with concern. “I really don’t mean to impose, you know. I’m not asking you for anything.”

“No, not at all,” Ludwig replied quickly. He marked himself lucky for being deft in navigating this particular area of business politics, and made up his mind on the spot. “And I’m not guaranteeing anything, nor am I asking you to consider something you wouldn’t be interested in. But if you want, I’d like to show you around our studio, at least. So you can see how we operate.”

Vash folded his hands in front of him, and Ludwig could tell that the simplicity of the response was as calculated as the offer. “Understood. When?”

Well, given their mutual understanding, he didn’t see why not—

“How about right now?”

Something passed over Vash’s face—so brief that Ludwig couldn’t identify exactly what it was, or if it had even been more than a figment of his imagination—but then he nodded, so they settled their check, finished their coffees, and hailed a cab. As they sat in the car, between apologizing to his old friend for the abominable traffic and making more small talk about New York City and architecture periodicals and the weather, Ludwig hypothesized that the serendipity of the universe was about to make quite an interesting return into his life, and into Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects, in one way or another, and he wondered whether there was anything he could do to brace himself for what he could only predict would be entirely unpredictable.

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**A short and sweet beginning, but don’t worry—things will stay neither for long!** ****

**This story is as much an ode to New York City and its white-collar professional culture as it is the hopeless slow-burn romance between our favorite star-crossed ‘neighbors’ that you’re all here for. That being said, I’ll give the standard disclaimer: the events and characters in this story are fictional. All reference to real places and real people are not intended to be interpreted as factual, and any editorial statements on real places and people do not necessarily reflect fact nor the author’s personal opinions. Credit for the characters’ bases obviously goes to Hetalia and its creator, Hidekaz Himaruya.** ****

**By the way, you may have noticed that I have “recommended listening” at the top of the chapter. This will be a recurring item—with each chapter I’ll pair one or two songs that capture its general tone, and that I listened to heavily as I wrote it. If you like listening to music while reading to help set the mood, check them out! If not, you won’t be missing out on anything life-or-death, so don’t worry about it.** ****

**Last, but definitely not least, this story is rated E (Explicit) and is intended for Mature audiences. This story will contain explicit sexual content, drug and alcohol usage, and deals extensively with potentially upsetting themes including homophobia, mental health, grief and tragedy, and so on. It is a story about adults and is therefore, by nature, adult. Please read at your own discretion.** ****

**See you in chapter 2!**


	2. That Certain Something

_Recommended listening: “We Used To Be Friends” by The Dandy Warhols_

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 **2  
** **That Certain Something  
** **_Das besondere etwas_ **

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Roderich Edelstein, resident bespectacled Austrian, brunet, and senior architect at the gayest architecture office on the East Coast as verified by _dezeen_ in August of 2011—and probably also the blondest, for that matter—was not in the habit of rushing. He never had been, he didn’t usually feel that he should be, and quite frankly, he (and his Italian-made leather loafers and his Luca Faloni shirt and his vintage Armani blazer and his meticulously-styled hair) liked it just fine that way.

But not today. Today, calfskin and cashmere and hair spray and all, Roderich was making a mad dash down to the third floor of 171 Duane Street, frantically trying to figure out why the Fedex hadn’t arrived at 10 that morning like it was supposed to, and like it _always fucking did_. And he was also trying to figure out where his studio manager and dearest friend Francis had gone, because he wasn’t up on the fifth floor, where he should have been, and where he _always fucking was_.

Roderich stuck his head into the modeling studio to bother his fabricator, Alfred (who was gay, and blond), to interrogate him about whether he’d seen the delivery or Francis (also gay—well, actually, he didn’t discriminate—and also blond). In doing so, he missed by seconds his other boss and longtime friend, Ludwig (again, _gay_ and fucking _blond_ ) enter the office. And the not-quite-blond-but-not-quite- _not_ -blond kid at the front desk, Raivis (and Roderich wasn’t certain, but the guy looked like a twink, and it had taken like two months to memorize his name, and _yes_ he felt bad about that but he’d been so busy lately it was just impossible) shouted back to him that the Priority Overnight van was pulling up to their building, and as Roderich bolted down to harass the person unloading the packages while Alfred went back to the 3D printer recalibration that Roderich had interrupted, he had no idea just how close he’d brushed with yet _another_ gay, blond man who he—in no exaggerated sense—was less expecting to see on this dizzyingly hectic and utterly random Tuesday morning than any other being, gay or blond or otherwise, in the known universe.

If Roderich had been aware of what he’d missed in his desperate chase for the two most important F-words in his life in that moment, he might have made more of an effort to regain his composure, try to still his panic and prepare some version of detached nonchalance with which to take the whole thing in. If Roderich had been aware of who had just walked into his office at nearly the precise moment he’d exited it, he might have taken off the Armani blazer, because it was still pretty warm out for September and standing on the sidewalk, yelling at—and being yelled at by—the Fedex delivery driver as he made the poor man dig through his entire van to get Roderich his package _first_ —“I need it _first_! I needed it an _hour_ ago—look, here—here’s twenty, does that help?”—he could feel himself starting to break a sweat. _Ugh_.

He was not aware, though, and so with the mantra _Fedex, Francis, Fedex, Francis_ pounding through him like a second heartbeat, Roderich took the stairs two-at-a-time from the street back up to the fourth floor, and he burst into the architecture studio with his precious bribery-obtained tube of papers clutched safely in his grasp. And yes, he was red in the face and, yes, completely winded, and looking, probably, a bit deranged—but time was of the essence, here, more than dignity.

Roderich Edelstein should have known better than to sacrifice dignity to save time, and typically he did. But the Fedex was _so_ late, damn it, the one day he _really_ needed it to be on time, and he had to get on the phone with those inept French contractors _right fucking now_ , and he spoke not a lick of French—hence the hunt for Francis—and he just had to do what he had to do, okay?

Thankfully, the two people he needed to see most urgently were standing there on the fourth floor, backs turned, and he identified them peripherally as his coworkers because they were both _fucking blond_.

For fuck’s sake, it was like a uniform, honestly.

“Ludwig, Francis—” He was still bounding up the last few stairs as he called out, trying simultaneously to smooth back his hair with his free hand and adjust his glasses with his not-free hand and catch his breath because he was really not in the mood to be made fun of right now. “The Fedex just arrived—” _Okay, it’s definitely time to start getting in shape._ “—let’s please look at these revisions before—”

And then Ludwig and Francis turned around, and they were actually not Ludwig and Francis at all.

Well, one of them _was_ Ludwig, but the other was…

Roderich skidded to a halt. The hand working at his hair jerked sideways, registering vaguely that he’d probably just made it worse, and the other hand went completely slack. He heard his coveted tube hit the floor, and there was nothing he could do to stop any of it. _What—_

“Morning,” Ludwig greeted him briskly, as if time was moving at a completely normal meter instead of slowing to a crawl. “Where’s Francis? Don’t you two have a call in a few minutes?”

Roderich didn’t quite comprehend the words that had come out of his colleague’s mouth, his brain suddenly paralyzed, and his vision was all at once ensnared by the person who was standing next to Ludwig, who looked just exactly like—but no, _no way…_

“I—” He forced himself to speak against burning lungs. “—I’m looking for Francis. The Fedex was _so_ late— _fuck_ —”

Judging by the way Ludwig stared, Roderich was sure he was making an absolute buffoon of himself as he gestured to nothing, and then remembered he had dropped the tube, and hurried to retrieve it. He swayed slightly as he straightened up, because this day was already wreaking havoc on his blood pressure, and when the man next to Ludwig spoke quietly, sounding a little embarrassed on Roderich’s own behalf, there was absolutely no question of who he was.

“Yeah, the traffic was pretty bad out there…”

Roderich blinked and wondered vaguely if this was all some very casual coup, with everyone acting infuriatingly calm, like he had any time for this, like this was fucking _normal_ —

“I’m sorry, but what the hell is going on?” But no, time was beginning to move again, he had to—“No—wait, I have to find Francis—” and he’d only taken one step back when another person strode into the space from behind him.

“Settle down, Roderich, I’m right here. You have the Fedex? Here—” and in one fluid motion Francis Bonnefoy (whose long, blond hair was tied back, unlike the hair he’d just mistaken for it) snatched the package from his arms and pushed a lidded paper cup into his hands. “I think you could use this.”

He glanced back as he made his way to the cutting table. “Nice jacket, by the way. Armani, right?”

Roderich recovered only enough to not drop the coffee that had been thrust upon him, lip curling distastefully as he sipped it and realized it was the shit from one of those carts on the corner of Broadway and Duane. But he didn’t stop drinking, even as it scalded his tongue and burned the back of his throat, because the caffeine begin to pile mercifully onto the three cups he’d already had that morning, setting his brain alight with a renewed manic buzz. Refocusing with a little shake of his head, he rushed past the two people who had just _completely_ thrown off his careening momentum to help Francis unfurl the prints from the tube over the cutting table. He swore as he scanned the pages of plans, once clean but now marked up in red.

“Shit, Francis, look at this—they’ve _completely_ fucked up the South elevation.”

As he bemoaned the incompetence of the French—Parisian superior taking it with patient amusement and conceding just enough to keep his Viennese architect satisfied—Roderich did not catch the exchange between the two people behind him, who he was actually quite intent on putting out of his mind for the moment.

“So you can probably see why we’re trying to hire another person,” Ludwig murmured as he watched on, a little surprised at just how unhinged Roderich had been acting.

“He does seem sort of overwhelmed,” Vash replied, looking mildly shellshocked himself.

“Well.” Ludwig turned toward him. “Like I said earlier, we’ve been trying to hire someone for two months now, so it’s really his own fault he’s still doing this to himself.”

And then, hardly a minute before he was meant to start his call, Roderich finally gave an exasperated sigh, slumped down on one of the stools next to the table, and put his head in his hands. Francis turned back toward the people he’d previously ignored, forgoing the effort to placate his colleague, and smiled amicably. Ludwig frowned.

“I think that coffee may have been a bad idea,” he commented, craning his neck past Francis toward where his senior architect was sitting. “There is such a thing as too much, you know.”

“Ah, maybe.” Francis glanced back at Roderich too, smile turning more toward the apologetic. “Sorry—Ludwig, can we do introductions later, please? As you know, we’re under a very strict non-disclosure—”

“Say no more.” Ludwig threw his hands up in surrender. “When will you be done?”

“Not more than an hour, I’m sure.”

“Okay—Vash,” Ludwig addressed the only person in the room that Francis didn’t know. “I don’t want to make you wait—”

“I don’t mind, I get it,” the man interjected.

“Alright, then.” Ludwig began to turn back toward the stairs they’d originally come from. “I’ll introduce you to the rest of the staff.”

When they left, Francis turned back to Roderich, who had raised his head again, looking disproportionately defeated for a Tuesday morning. He’d looked disproportionately defeated for a while now, actually, and Francis put a sympathetic hand on his Armani-clad shoulder even though it was really his own fault—rejecting the eleventh candidate to relieve some of the overwhelm just the day before.

“I didn’t realize we had another interview scheduled today. It’s not on the calendar, is it?”

“We don’t. That was—” Roderich’s cell phone interrupted his explanation, and the caller I.D. flashed a French number. “Shit, I’ll tell you after we speak with these morons. Brace yourself.”

**: : :  
** **: : :**

“So, who is visiting our office today,” Francis began, his tone light and conversational as he penned through his notes, “that upset you so much?”

“I’m not upset.” Roderich’s reply was equally mild, thankfully having found some recompose over the course of the call. He peered over at the notepad. “Just too busy. God, why can’t you write those in English so I can actually read them?”

“Why can’t you learn French?” Francis teased. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

Roderich sniffed at the suggestion, but smiled back from one side of his mouth. “Because French pronunciation is for sociopaths, and I do not have time for that. I mean, it’s not the atrocity that is the English language, but why can’t _you_ learn German?”

Francis laughed out loud. “Maybe if we were working with German contractors like this, I would. But you know, I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding my question.”

“If we were working with German contractors I would be doing this myself, instead of having you take notes for me that I can’t read anyway.” The brunet glanced over, too aware of his colleague’s pointed gaze. “We also wouldn’t need to do this so often, because Germans aren’t completely incompetent in construction,” he muttered.

Roderich pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose so that the tops of the rounded tortoiseshell frames weren’t obstructing his field of view, and he let his eyes roam back over the plans spread before them. He sighed.

“Fine. He went to school with Ludwig and I, in Stuttgart. We’ve been out of touch for a long time. I didn’t realize Ludwig still kept up with him.”

Francis pursed his lips coyly, like he always did when he wanted to pry. “That sounds… complicated?”

Roderich rolled his eyes, like he always did when Francis wanted to pry. “You think everything is complicated. It just surprised me a little.”

Francis hummed. “So, does he have a name? Oh, no, I think Ludwig said it...”

“It’s Vash. Vash Zwingli.”

If the name sounded odd in Roderich’s head, then it was completely alien on his tongue. It could have been of a dead language; it referred to a part of his life that he made a concentrated effort not to dwell on, a bastion of memories he had long since committed to burying deep in the ground of the past and leaving there for good: university. Because although Roderich’s years in university were, yes, an instrumental foundation for his promising career, were about as wild and raucous as any young adult could hope for, and were the source of some of the closest friendships he’d ever had—and he wouldn’t trade any of that for the world—those years were also a time of immense repression, a repression so deep it had nearly destroyed him.

Despite his dark hair, Roderich did take after the majority of the staff of B&B in that he was a gay man. _Very_ gay, actually, and he had been forever—he could identify in hindsight—before he’d even had a word to put to it. But Roderich was also of a family with views that skewed steeply toward the conservative, and expectations that skewed steeply toward the demanding. During their frequent absences, equally for business as for leisure, his parents had left him in the care of various housekeepers and nannies and nagged from afar about schoolwork and piano practice and what was allowed on the television and what were appropriate outfits for a growing boy to wear to Mass. They were impossible to satisfy even when they _were_ around for the recitals and top marks and über-becoming behavior, and they expressed to him from a young age little else than their desire for their only son to grow up, marry a good woman from a good family, and continue on the Edelstein bloodline as so many generations had done before him. Roderich could recall a variety of situations along the lines of being eight years old and his father threatening to shut his fingers in the cellar door if he was caught playing with his mother’s lipstick again, and thus he’d learned from an early age to stifle any impulse which might upset that tenuous balance in which he did as they wanted and earned their approval in return.

If opting to attend a German state school—rather than remaining in Vienna and languishing under an army of private tutors and female suitors and society personalities and the like—had been the first act of material rebellion he’d ever pulled on his mother and father, it could not be said that the attitude that had emboldened his decision actually followed him to Stuttgart. Despite ever-growing doubts as to his preference for said female suitors, he had no misconceptions as to the consequences of voicing those preferences aloud—much less _acting_ on them—and so, for lack of a more palatable option, he simply accepted that he was going to have to ignore any doubts he may have had uncompromisingly, and trust (and _ensure_ , if by nothing other than sheer force of will) that everything would be just fine that way.

So he’d pushed it all down, scolded and denied and berated himself when needed, and set off for ABK Stuttgart at eighteen years of age only to find that a statistically significant handful of his peers, including his two closest friends, made all of this scolding and denying and berating much more difficult for him by living their openly homosexual lives around him as he had to watch. And the worse he felt about it all, the more he dug his heels in, and the whole thing finally came to a head when he was about to graduate, and—among plans to move to New York City and help Ludwig build his new business venture—he made what seemed like a perfectly justifiable decision, at the time: he got married. To a woman.

She was a lovely woman, really, a shrewd and politically-minded minx of a woman, with endless wit and enough charm and ferocity alike to ward off the rainiest of days. They got along well, and she was approved of by his parents, which is why he’d had any hope at all that he could make the whole thing work. But it only took one year in the United States—a year of exponential professional growth, of burying himself in the immense workload of keeping a brand new business afloat, and of a selection of times he’d seriously considered jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge—for the whole thing to finally fall apart catastrophically before him.

And it had been quite catastrophic, indeed.

So Roderich did his best not to think about all of that, and he was generally reasonably successful in his efforts. He didn’t _want_ to look back, because his life had improved in leaps and bounds since then: now, at thirty-going-on-thirty-one years old, he had an iPhone 4, had been divorced and disowned, had discovered the fantastic spectacle of a Greenwich Village drag show, and had become well-acquainted with the finer points of having a cock up his ass.

But the person who walked into Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy today was a forceful reminder of all that history, of how much of his youth he’d squandered in a desperately long-winded attempt to preserve a façade that was doomed from the start, and that shook him more deeply than he cared to admit.

So yes, _okay_ , Francis was right—it was maybe a _little_ complicated.

Not that he was going to concede to it.

“So…” Francis said, eyeing Roderich curiously as he waded up past his ears in his thoughts. “Shall we go down and see what he’s doing in our office?”

Roderich wasn’t quite convinced that the answer was ‘yes’, but at that moment the answer was submitted for him when Ludwig’s voice addressed them from across the room.

“Are you two done with your call?”

Francis swiveled in his seat to see the two men from earlier on the landing. Roderich lurched in his.

“We’re done,” Francis answered. “Apologies for the wait. Let’s introduce ourselves properly.” He stood to meet the others in the center of the space, and Roderich followed suit, not quite sure if he should be more thankful or irritated that his colleague was perceptive enough to take the lead.

Francis stepped out to shake the hand of Vash Zwingli—living, breathing, in-the-flesh Vash Zwingli—and Roderich wondered suddenly if this whole ‘blond’ thing hadn’t followed him around longer than he’d really realized.

“ _Enchanté_ ,” was Francis’s introduction of choice—never one to miss an opportunity to flaunt whatever _je ne sais quoi_ he thought he had. “Francis Bonnefoy. I’m Ludwig’s business partner and the studio manager here.”

Vash nodded, returning the handshake. “ _Pareillement_. Vash Zwingli.”

“Ooh,” Francis nearly swooned, eyes lighting up, in Roderich’s opinion, rather dangerously. “ _Parlez-vous français_?”

Ludwig turned to face the recipient of Francis’s attention. “Right. Swiss. How many languages do you speak, again?”

Vash suddenly looked a little bashful under the collective attention, and his eyes darted toward Roderich’s for a moment, lingering briefly before he looked away.

To Roderich’s dismay, those eyes were just as green as they’d always been.

“Ah, well, German, Swiss and _Hoch_ —er, standard—and English, obviously. And enough French.” He furrowed his brow in thought. “I never bothered with Italian, though recently I picked up just enough Dutch to either buy a drink or tell someone to fuck off—”

Francis and Ludwig laughed genially, and the wheels of Roderich’s brain spun without gaining traction. _Dutch? When did_ that _happen_ —

“But of course,” Francis spoke again, “don’t let me keep you from catching up with your old friends, Vash. I have to go translate these notes—” He raised his notepad. “—for my colleagues who _don’t_ speak French.” And with a wink, Francis sauntered off to the stairs that led up to his office on the fifth floor.

Roderich blanched as Vash turned toward him, because he still had no idea how they were supposed to actually greet one another.

“Um. Hi,” he said. _Fuck, that’s stupid_. “Um, sorry about earlier. Things are a bit busy at the moment.”

That was not much better, but at least it was something.

“Hi.” Vash cocked his head a bit, and Roderich couldn’t tell if it was intended to be mocking. “It’s fine, I—”

Ludwig’s phone rang abruptly from his pocket, and he frowned apologetically when he checked the ID. “Sorry,” he sighed, “I need to take this. Give me five minutes?” He raised a pointed eyebrow in Roderich’s direction, no less incriminating than Francis’s earlier one, and then turned away.

Roderich hoped whatever face he made back didn’t look as desperate as he felt, but Ludwig’s departure left him with few alternatives to acknowledging the person he still wasn’t quite convinced was more than just a figment of his caffeine-addled imagination.

“Sorry,” Vash said to him, and Roderich was accosted by the sudden desire to run, as fast as he could, to anywhere that wasn’t here. ‘Desire’ and ‘run’ were not two words Roderich would have ever imagined himself using in the same sentence before that moment. “I realize that you’re sort of overbooked. Don’t push your schedule on my account.”

Vash shifted his weight on his feet and glanced down at the floor, and Roderich wondered vaguely if he still ran. He kind of looked like he did; his turtleneck fit snug and athletic on his torso, and he kind of looked like he could run up four flights of stairs without even being winded.

For some reason, the thought made Roderich’s mouth dry.

“No, no—” He wasn’t sure why he didn’t take the escape that was offered to him. “I’ll be here until midnight anyway, I’m sure, so it doesn’t matter.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Uhm,” Roderich said for what felt like the millionth time, “I didn’t realize you and Ludwig kept in touch.”

“We didn’t.” Vash shook his head quickly. “I saw, you know, that write-up in _dezeen_ , and I was going to be around so I thought I would, erm, reach out.”

“Oh, that.” Roderich forced a laugh at the mention of the article, feeling awfully self-conscious for the… fifth? Tenth?—well, it was probably more like one continuous time, today. The laugh caught halfway in his throat. “Yes, that was kind of just—I mean, not exactly—well, it was just kind of clickbait, I guess, in my opinion. I mean, just—well, all I mean is that we’ve had more serious press…” Midway through the sentence it was actually _palpable_ , the utter moronism of each word coming out of his mouth, just babbling along like this, but he’d apparently lost all ability to make a graceful recovery. “…i-is all.”

Vash just looked at him.

“Right,” he said.

Roderich considered, briefly, the plausibility of simply walking over to the bannister and throwing himself over the side. Rallying a compromise between each side of his brain, he elected to try speaking once more.

“So, why _are_ you here—” _Fuck, that was rude_. He rushed to correct himself: “—i-in New York, I mean, what brings you here?”

Rudeness aside, Vash only looked relieved to have a solid topic to work with. “Ah, for Lilli, actually, if you remember—she just started at NYU, so—”

“Lilli’s in _college_?” Roderich couldn’t help the sentimental pull at the corners of his mouth. “My God, the last time I saw her she was, what, ten? Eleven?”

“I know,” Vash agreed. “It’s honestly amazing, how much she’s grown.” He smiled, finally, and some small thing came loose in Roderich’s chest and rattled around.

Fearing it might actually be audible, he elected to drown it out by asking, “So, what is she studying, then?”

“Chemistry,” Vash answered proudly. “And I always thought the math we did in school was advanced, but the things she’s going to be doing are something else _completely_ —”

Roderich finally allowed himself to exhale some of the nervous energy in his throat, relaxing a little. “Well, she was always so smart, I’m glad it’s being put to good use.”

“Yeah,” Vash nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

But the relaxation was short-lived, and with that line of conversation spent, they were hard-pressed for another. Roderich glanced around the room and tapped his fingers restlessly against his thigh, wishing he had another cup of coffee that would keep them better occupied. Where was Ludwig—had it really not been five minutes yet?

“So…” Vash began again, running a hand across the back of his neck and looking nearly as uncomfortable as Roderich felt. “How’ve you been?”

Well, _that_ was a pretty loaded question.

“I’ve been… good,” Roderich replied slowly, trying to decide how best to dodge the colossal mass of subtext barreling down on him—and then something came tumbling out of his mouth that he didn’t anticipate. “I’m not married anymore, you know.”

Vash blinked, seeming more surprised by the timing than the actual thing that was said.

“Right.” He looked at the floor, a light crease in his brows. “Should I say sorry or congratulations?”

Roderich grimaced, too-aware that his face was now burning. “I’m sure you already know the answer to that.”

Vash’s eyes roamed over Roderich’s Italian-made leather loafers, past his Luca Faloni shirt and his vintage Armani blazer, up to his meticulously-styled (and probably still fucked-up) hair, and then back down again.

“Yeah, I think I can guess.”

Roderich felt like he might _dissolve_ under the scrutiny. Who was Vash, anyway, to just barge into his office—his _life_ —unannounced and uninvited? _Damn_ it, where _was_ Ludwig? He could be held responsible for this. And then another thing materialized on his lips that he hadn’t remotely authorized.

“Do you want to get lunch?” _Fuck_.

“Uh—” Vash’s moment of hesitation was all it took for Roderich to lose his grip entirely.

“I-I mean I just don’t know when Ludwig will be done with his call and I feel a little faint after all that coffee and I should probably eat at my desk and work but if I do that another day in a row—”

“—okay—”

“—I might _actually_ shoot myself, so—”

“—sure.” Both parties winced as the last part of Roderich’s sentence slid in underneath Vash’s. “I… I could go for lunch.”

So Roderich dashed behind the bookshelves that separated the common area from his desk, digging through his bag for his wallet while focusing on not hyperventilating over what he’d just imposed on them. As he rummaged, Ludwig’s voice sounded through the space again:

“Don’t tell me he’s abandoned you already?”

The ‘he’ in question finally located the item he was looking for, took one more deep breath, and strode back to the two blond men, trying to force something nice and unconcerned-looking over his panic-adjacent interior.

“Please, Ludwig. I may be overworked, but I’m not _that_ rude—wait—” A welcome distraction stopped him in his tracks, making it impossible to hide the smirk that crept up into his face. “—what are you _wearing_?”

Okay, so maybe a little rude, then.

Ludwig gave him a withering look, but shrugged. “You know, it’s Feliciano, what can I say?” He sighed, and Vash shot a grin in Roderich’s direction. “Vash called it ‘ _Schutzstaffel_ ’ this morning, so I’ll have to tell Feli it’s not working.”

That was so completely like Vash to say—some precise combination of vaguely offensive and actually hilarious that until this moment Roderich had sort of forgotten even existed—and as the grin was wiped from Vash’s face and rapidly replaced with something rather mortified Roderich might have laughed, but no laugh was possible as his breath suddenly seemed to have caught in his throat.

He swallowed thickly to reset his diaphragm. “How astute. Anyway, I’m starving.” He waved the hand holding his wallet. “We were getting lunch, care to join?”

“Where to?”

It was Roderich’s turn to shrug. “Hadn’t decided. Dante?”

Ludwig made a face. “No, we were just there this morning.”

 _Into his office! His life! His favorite! Restaurant! Unannounced! Uninvited!_ “You went to Dante _without_ me?” he scoffed, and then turned on Vash, donning his most sardonic attitude like plate armor. “Well, I hope you enjoyed yourselves.”

Ludwig scoffed back, “Like you’re not already there with Sadiq all the time.” And that was true, actually, but Roderich felt another little pang in his chest at the mention. He brushed it away.

“Whatever,” he replied. “It’s not like I have time to go all the way up to the Village anyway. Let’s just go downstairs.” And Ludwig agreed and Vash was at the mercy of the two people who knew the city best, so Roderich led the way.

And it was _weird_ , Roderich thought as they walked, just so utterly fucking _weird_ to be all three together, in one room, with no warning and no revealed reason and after—what, seven?—years of not speaking at all. Was he supposed to be _happy_ about this? Vash used to be his friend, after all—his _best_ friend—but it did seem a little unfair of the universe to assume it was okay to just drop all this on him, especially when he was so busy with everything else.

As the three old friends exited Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects and walked down to the first floor of 171 Duane, Roderich’s mind wandered back to the complications he hadn’t told Francis about, that made this whole thing so delightfully, erm, _complicated_.

**: : :  
** **: : :**

_He’d been carrying the stupid ring around in his pocket since Christmas, and no one in Stuttgart knew._

_It was solid gold, thick and flat and ostentatious. It weighed in Roderich’s pocket like a brick, ungainly despite its small size and terribly heavy even against the exhilarating scheme that that he and Ludwig and Vash had cooked up over the course of their last year of university, between their internships and final theses and study sessions for licensure exams._

_When Ludwig first floated the idea of starting a business together, and made a case for the viability of doing so in New York City, Roderich had envisioned some great adventure—a triumphant, musketeer-ing extrapolation of the thing the three of them had built here in Stuttgart, transposed onto the most exciting city in the world._

_But the ring in his pocket constantly reminded him that it would not be just the three of them._

_And no one in Stuttgart knew. Not that he was_ hiding _it, obviously, he had no reason to hide any of it—but it was just… well, the words hadn’t quite…_

_Well, it just wasn’t the right time, yet._

_Besides, he had other things to worry about—not the least of which were his academic obligations, which Roderich was decidedly certain had hit their blistering apex after five years of steady intensification. Then there was the whole thing with their international move (though his parents were taking care of most of it, thankfully), and all of the planning for how they’d brand themselves, and what work they’d have to start off with, and whether they would visit Central Park or the Statue of Liberty or Times Square first upon arriving._

_And then there was Vash._

_Vash had been distant, lately, in a way Roderich neither recognized nor was able to name. Like, yes, they’d barely seen one another all semester, there was that. Vash was in class every day Roderich was at his internship, and Roderich was in class every day Vash was at_ his _internship; Vash had studio hours every night Roderich was home studying, and Roderich had studio hours every night Vash was home studying, but still. Still, that didn’t fully account for the cool rapport between them, this semester. In fact, Roderich wasn’t sure there was anything that really_ could _._

_That, actually, might have been weighing on him even more heavily than the ring._

_But that was the good thing about their plan: even though they‘d barely spent more than an hour together in the same place all semester, that was going to change. In America, they’d be working together every day, again, and he’d get to talk to Vash all the time, again, because they’d sit beside each other at their new American desks in their American studio and drink American coffee (which was just as good as_ Weiner melange _, in Roderich’s imagination) and talk about their projects and look at the same computer screens and drawings and—_

_Before Roderich could blink, the semester had whirled its way into the final week._

_And that was when he realized he’d run out of time, one pristine June evening as the sun was setting over the_ Weißenhofsiedlung _, as he sat out on the campus lawn, relishing in a brief moment of stillness before the last big push to the end, before his departure from the cradle of academia and emergence into the rest of his life._

_He looked at Vash, and Lilli on her brother’s lap, and Ludwig beside them, all sitting in the same place for the first time in over a week. In front of them, he suddenly felt numb and detached, and they all looked strangely small, there, as if merely reflections of some perspectival illusion in which his body was sitting in a very different place than his eyes were seeing from._

_A breeze ruffled his hair, tickling the back of his neck and lifting goosebumps along his spine._

_“I’m getting married.”_

_Roderich turned instinctively, thoughtlessly toward Vash as he said it, trying to gauge the reception of the words he’d repeated in his head so many times that they felt alien on his tongue._

_Vash pulled up a fistful of grass from the ground beside him, face oddly blank._

_“Is that why you’ve been acting so weird lately?” he asked after a long, silent moment._

_“I haven’t been acting weird lately,” Roderich retorted reflexively, too quickly. He looked toward Ludwig, whose expression was even more inscrutable than Vash’s. He laughed a little, chest suddenly the wrong size for his lungs. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”_

_“You’re—” Vash laughed too, but it was strangled and humorless. “—what do you—to_ who _?”_

_“Well, to Elizabeta, obviously,” Roderich said. “At the end of the month.” He looked toward Ludwig again and felt his heart beating behind his teeth, waiting for any affirmation that this decision he’d been carrying around with him for six months was as correct as it was necessary._

_“You can’t do that,” Vash said, voice suddenly sharp as a knife through the sweet summer air. “You can’t think that’s a good idea—”_

_“It won’t change anything,” Roderich insisted. “We’ll still—”_

_“—like you can’t just keep fucking_ lying _to yourself—”_

_“Watch your language, Vash,” Ludwig warned with an eye toward Lilli, and Vash turned to face him, expression grave._

_“Lud, he_ can’t _—I mean how can you act like this is—”_

_“It’s not your life, Vash, you can’t just—”_

_“Well_ someone _needs to do something about—”_

_“It isn’t your decision to make!” Ludwig raised his voice to cut over Vash’s. “And it’s not mine, either.” He glanced sideways at Roderich, who now felt vaguely like he was intruding, but his hands and legs were glued to the ground where he sat._

_Vash stood up abruptly, upsetting his sister’s position on his lap, and stepped back from the circle they’d been sitting in. “I—” He looked between Roderich and Ludwig for a moment, mouth hanging open, something unidentifiable in his eyes. “I got that job at IDA. In Hamburg. So—so good luck with your life, I guess.”_

_The future folded like a piece of paper around the ring in Roderich’s pocket._

_“Is that why_ you’ve _been acting so weird lately?” he asked, but Vash didn’t acknowledge it at all._

_Ludwig straightened. “Wait, hey, we had a plan—”_

_“Well I’m not just gonna sit here and fucking_ enable _—”_

 _“I said_ watch _your language—so you’re just going to up and abandon everything we’ve—”_

 _“You know what, we_ did _have a plan, yeah!” Vash shouted, his tone suddenly explosive and destructive, and he pointed an accusing finger in Roderich’s direction even as Roderich fell further back from the brewing argument. “And_ this _wasn’t part of it—”_

_“It’s not like everything is going to change—”_

_“—because we_ agreed _that it would be—”_

_“—and it isn’t your decision, you can’t just—”_

_“—and if he actually thinks that he can—”_

_“Oh my God—” Ludwig finally shouted. “Why do you care so much, anyway?!”_

_Vash seemed to choke on the way the question silenced the entire night around them._

_Watching his life unravel before his eyes, feeling suddenly, inexplicably tiny, smothered between the lawn and the rest of the universe, Roderich spoke._

_“The wedding is a week after we graduate.”_

_Vash finally looked at him again. His expression was contorted into something Roderich had never seen before, something he couldn’t name._

_“Well, I’m leaving the day after we graduate.”_

_He gathered Lilli into his arms, and walked away from his two bewildered best friends._

_Roderich only realized in hindsight that those were the last words that Vash would ever say to him._

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So… right. Roderich glanced back toward Vash Zwingli, who was somehow a real, existing entity. Just a _little_ complicated.

And, oh—

There was one other thing.

One very slightly-possibly-significant other thing.

Roderich knew it wasn’t fair, okay, and he knew it probably wasn’t true, either, but some less generous side of him felt he might have successfully gotten away with pretending to be straight for the rest of his life—not happily, per se, but _reasonably_ alright—if it hadn’t been for one specific person from his years in school: his mysterious Swiss roommate with a gruff exterior, a hidden soft side, and absolutely the most exquisite fucking body and brain Roderich had ever laid his eyes on.

And that was the very same Vash Zwingli, and God _damn_ it all—if anything, he looked even more gorgeous now than Roderich remembered.

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**The plot thickens (a little).** ****

**I don’t want to editorialize over this story too much, since I’d prefer it speak for itself, and I’m going to try to keep my notes to a minimum after this (if you have questions about things that are mentioned, message me! There are a lot of details and references baked into this story and I would honestly love to nerd out with y’all). That said, I do want to address the characterization, since it departs a little from the canon. I feel like this can be said to a certain extent about any AU, but here, in particular, the characters and their personalities and relationships are all molded very intentionally to fit this story arc, and so they are sometimes removed a degree or two from the original characters and more than a few degrees from the canon storyline. To be more to the point, I think you could say that they’re all a little more polite toward one another, in general, and a little more elastic toward the world, though certainly just as hopelessly stubborn. They’re doing their best! In some ways, Vash and Roderich’s attitudes are indirectly inspired by two old colleagues of mine, some of my favorite people in the world, who I had the joy of watching work together on a regular basis. Anyway, I hope y’all find these guys palatable and not too much of a stretch (though that’s kind of the nice thing about these characters—they’re stretchy.)**

**Stay tuned for Vash’s take on all of this!**


	3. The Center of the Universe

_Recommended listening: “Sowieso - Radio Version” by Mark Forster, “Breakin’ Up” by Rilo Kiley_

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**3  
** **The Center of the Universe  
** **_Das Zentrum des Universums_ **

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In the three weeks, three days, and about four-and-a-half hours that Vash Zwingli had lived in New York City so far, he had gathered a sufficient body of evidence to support his determination that the cultural and economic nucleus of the United States of America was probably one of the strangest places—and certainly the most overwhelming—that he had ever been.

Every morning when Vash left the tiny Murray Hill pied-à-terre where he and his sister, Lilli, were staying while they looked for more permanent housing, it seemed he saw something that he wasn’t expecting.

The first day he was in New York, he happened upon a man in a bowtie walking four tiny dogs down the street, each adorned in a colorful sweater, and he thought the little things looked a bit like rats. The second day, he decided to traverse the New York City subway, and he saw an _actual_ rat, and then two more fighting over a moldy plastic wrapper on the tracks, and he felt kind of bad for comparing those dogs from the day before to such repugnant subterranean behemoths. The third day, as he began to carve out a route for his daily jog through his new home, he made the mistake of looking directly at a haggard man sitting in the middle of the sidewalk with a large cardboard sign that read “ALL CUNTS ARE CREATED EQUAL.” The man screeched an inscrutable tune at him until he was out of earshot, and Vash swore he would never make eye contact with a stranger again.

The fourth day was that horrid rainy-misty weather that an umbrella just couldn’t combat, and Vash achieved moderate success in dodging the growing puddles along the curbs as he jogged down the same street and saw the same man slumped beneath the same sign, an upturned baseball cap loose in his hand. Vash didn’t drop any change in the cap because he hadn’t exchanged his leftover Euro for American dollars yet, and he figured that wouldn’t be very helpful, but as he passed he did think to himself for the first time of many that New York City was really quite bizarre.

Vash had never much been one for the more tourist-y aspects of travel, and he didn’t make a priority out of visiting the World Trade Center, or the Statue of Liberty, or the like. But it turned out that those things were actually quite difficult _not_ to visit, and as he attempted to familiarize himself with the city he found he was frequently running into such attractions anyway. While walking across town to meet with a competitor of his old employer, he realized he was passing the Empire State Building— _the_ Empire State Building (and it had a packed Starbucks at the bottom, which seemed… appropriately American). And as soon as he tore his eyes away from the indecipherable color combinations lighting up the top of it (a real affront to the landmark’s historical integrity, not that anyone had asked him) he found himself swept up in a massive cacophony of traffic and enormous LED screens and _so_ many people—none of whom were paying attention to how much space they or their shopping bags took up on the sidewalk—which was apparently home to the “World’s Largest Store,” and that store had the biggest, brightest sign of them all. The food trucks lining the intersection hissed and smoked and smelled overbearingly charred, and he later learned that the place was called Herald Square.

He made sure to take a different route on his way back.

The next week, Vash interviewed with a company that specialized in preservation and restoration in the Upper East Side, and he’d been feeling vaguely fatigued by the vast expanses of concrete that made up this city, seemingly impermeable to all but the most forlorn, scrubby-looking trees. When he got out of the subway and headed three blocks in the wrong direction before realizing his mistake, he stumbled upon as much greenery as he’d seen in his entire time in New York, and it stretched out of view in both directions, and he realized he’d probably just found Central Park. He made a mental note to go back later with Lilli and explore further.

So it was just hard to _not_ be a tourist, a little bit, but Vash did his best not to be obnoxious about it—which was more than could be said for a fair percentage of the people he passed each day. The question finally crossed his mind as he had to walk into oncoming traffic to get past a group of kids taking selfies outside of a SuperDry storefront: does anyone _actually_ live in New York?

 _Oh, right. I live in New York_.

There were a handful of occasions, both before and after he decided to buy the extra one-way ticket from the Hague/Rotterdam Airport to John F. Kennedy International, that Vash asked himself why he should be uprooting his entire life, at thirty years old, to move to America at all. Rotterdam was an objectively nice place: he could ride a bicycle virtually anywhere he wanted, his new degree and expiring no-compete contract opened a variety of comfortably-earning job prospects, and between German and English, he and Lilli could essentially get by without having to master yet another language. They also had universal healthcare, which they wouldn’t have in America and which people in America seemed to believe was a bad idea—and what was _that_ all about?

In spite of those things, the answer was easy. Lilli was going, so he was going. That was the way life had always been, ever since their parents passed away. When he went to Stuttgart for school, he took his sister with him. When he finished school, they moved to Hamburg, and when Vash quit his job there, to Rotterdam. So now to New York, and it was an open-and-shut case like that—not only as a matter of the responsibilities of legal guardianship (then again, now that Lilli was eighteen in America, it wasn’t really a matter of legal guardianship at all—but still). Vash’s life in Rotterdam could have been like heaven, and he would have left it for hell without a second thought if his sister wanted.

Not that their life in Rotterdam _was_ always like heaven, and Vash was a realist enough to admit it. The rainy climate made cycling only half as pleasant as he’d imagined it would be; the longer they lived there, the more people would glare when he opted for German or English over broken Dutch; and he was still shelling out more money than he cared to think about on private insurance regardless of the governmental safety net. And worse, Lilli had taken to the international move, well, about as kindly as could be expected for any sixteen-year-old who’d already lived in three places in the first two decades of her life. To her credit—and one drastic teenage-haircut-maneuver later—she did eventually come around to the idea, but Vash privately continued to believe that her doubts about moving may have ultimately been well-founded. And two years later, when Lilli began applying for universities that were specifically _not_ in Holland—despite the unholy price tag attached to American tuition—Vash was slightly-less-privately agreeable to the prospect.

The weeks both immediately preceding and immediately following the move had been a decidedly chaotic milieu, beginning and ending with the mind-numbing bureaucracy that surrounded communications between the U.S. State Department, the Swiss consulate in New York City and embassy in The Hague, and the American Embassy in Bern—all in the process of turning over Dutch visas for American ones. It had included coordinating farewells with Lilli’s friends from her school and his colleagues from _his_ school, wrapping up the freelance projects he’d been involved in over the past two years, a variety of moderately irritating correspondences with NYU over the topic of student loan and scholarship dispersals, and arranging overseas furniture shipping and storage. The latter point had been almost too much of a hassle to be worth the savings it boasted over simply starting anew—but it was no small amount of savings, and besides, Vash _liked_ the furniture they had, damn it.

In the mix of it all, reaching out to Ludwig Beilschmidt had been rather perfunctory a gesture at most. To be honest, what with the way things had gone all those years ago, he wasn’t necessarily expecting a reply of any kind, much less one in the affirmative. If he were to really press the issue, he wasn’t entirely sure that he even _wanted_ one. The whole ‘let’s get coffee’ thing hadn’t been much more than a late-night consequence of some terrible jet-lag, and he’d spent ten minutes squinting into the eye-watering blue light of his phone screen in the dark that night, rereading and rereading the typed email before finally deciding the words “lost touch” would have to be adequate to refer to… yeah. So he’d sent it and then immediately rolled over on the lumpy futon that was serving as his bed, and tried half-heartedly to fall asleep and forget about the email and the suggestion it contained altogether.

But, a reply he had received, and an affirmative one it had been, and so that was how three weeks, three days, and about four-and-a-half hours after his one-way flight landed in New York City, Vash Zwingli found himself sitting beside two very old friends in a very new place, in a restaurant called—he glanced around again—El Tomate Verde, in, er, Tribeca? Right?

Right. And the sun was shining, and there was paella coming his way, and his sister would be out of class in a couple of hours, and he was going to sit with her in Washington Square Park as she relayed to him all the things she was being taught in her classes like they’d done most afternoons lately. He wondered if for once he wouldn’t have some things to share in return, on account of his, um, _interesting_ morning, and in that vein—as the two people next to him talked through the call from earlier involving some incompetent-sounding French contractors—Vash mentally counted off the things he’d learned so far that day.

The article Vash had read about Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects was a feature-length profile written under the pretense of an up-and-coming studio angling toward fast success, but as far as Vash could tell, they were already achieving it heartily. Ludwig’s business catered to a small, selective, mainly international clientele of extraordinarily wealthy patrons of culture, which he had begun amassing connections with while still in school and completing his required internship credits. The output of the business was heavily modernist, and, in Vash’s opinion, wonderfully indulgent—it seemed that his German colleague was doing this rare thing where budgets got to be molded to fit ideas rather than the reverse, and he was _really_ making it work.

Earlier in the morning, while waiting for that call to end, Ludwig introduced Vash to the staff of his office, and that had been quite something in and of itself. There was Francis Bonnefoy, first—the company’s other namesake—who seemed to occupy some intersection between ‘too flirtatious for anyone’s good’ and ‘suave enough that it didn’t matter.’ Then there was Alfred, who managed all model-making for the architects and who was about as gregariously genial as a person could rightfully be. There was Kiku, an interior designer who seemed, upon first glance, exceptionally normal. There was Raivis, a jumpy guy at the front desk who didn’t look much older than Lilli; the on-site IT tech Eduard, whose office was illuminated only by computer light (by choice, Ludwig had assured him after they left); and Toris, the newly-hired research assistant Ludwig had mentioned at coffee earlier.

And apparently there were also people that he didn’t meet, but was assured were well-worth knowing. There was Gilbert, who was Ludwig’s older brother and the third and final partner of the business. Vash actually _had_ met him once before, one summer while still in school, but from what Ludwig was saying, now-Gilbert was a lot more, er, _stable_ than then-Gilbert. There was an architectural engineer from Sweden who was out for the day, but was apparently one of the critical figures in keeping the work-life balance of the office in good check. There was Feliciano, of course—Ludwig’s ultra-rich fiancé—whose apparel design studio occupied the floor below Ludwig’s business, and he had a twin brother who was his co-conspirator in said studio. And there was Francis and Gilbert’s friend Antonio, who Ludwig was glancing around for now, as they waited for their paella to be served, because apparently he was the owner and head chef of the restaurant in which they were sitting right at this very moment, on the first floor of the building that the gayest architecture office on the East Coast occupied.

Vash was beginning to get the idea that Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects and all those adjacent were a bit like a nebulous family, and for Ludwig to have cultivated something so human in such a non-human-scaled metropolis was altogether quite impressive. It was kind of cute, actually.

And then there was Roderich.

Vash knew that Roderich had moved to New York at the same time as Ludwig, of course, and it had occurred to him more than once that by moving to the same city—and certainly by getting in touch with Ludwig—that he could be venturing a little too close into his former roommate’s circles for either party’s comfort. But New York was very large, and it was populated by very many people, and Vash had counted on the statistical probability of not running into him at random to be well enough in his favor.

What Vash had _not_ counted on was the chain of events that turned simply meeting Ludwig Beilschmidt for coffee into going to his workplace, with a casual employment-opportunity-but-not-quite-offer sprinkled on, and then immediately coming face-to-face with the person he’d just sort of taken for granted was gone from his life forever.

And it had been seven years, and Vash knew he would never forget that face—short of blunt trauma to the head, maybe—but then… well, for all it was definitely _him_ who had come bursting into the office just moments after Ludwig and Vash had arrived, it was also a bit like looking at a different person entirely.

The Roderich that Vash had gone to school with was a product of the starched-and-powdered bourgeoise, born to the kind of old-world money and prestige that had caused Austria to outlaw the name ‘von’ in 1919, and the kind of family that, after nearly a century, was probably still really upset about it. Roderich could play at least three different musical instruments, had an informed opinion on the German ambassador to Austria’s daughter’s taste in vintage rosé, and had never once cleaned a room in the first eighteen years of his life. Roderich was the kind of wealthy that involved never learning how to use a _dishwasher_ —simply because someone else had always done it for him—so Vash taught him how it worked in one of those early days of school while reminding him with absolute incredulity that having a dishwasher _at all_ in their tiny, university-issued apartment was several sizable steps beyond a divine blessing.

Despite all that, though, and despite plenty of initial reservations (as well as several speculative conversations between himself and Ludwig about the possibility of Habsburg lineage), Vash had actually found Roderich to be a remarkably down-to-earth person—even so far as _frugal_ , when he wanted to be. If anything, Vash’s Austrian roommate seemed perfectly content to blend in at a German state school where no one knew or cared about his material circumstances—even if his expectations were sometimes colored by said material circumstances.

And then, the Roderich he’d gone to school with was extraordinarily unhappy, too, which Vash had known right away. It was just so _obvious_ —his stiff reserve, his anxious vanity—and Vash spent the five years they were living and studying together making little incremental efforts here and there to unravel it. Because, if anything, watching someone so deeply in denial try to insist they had nothing to hide was actually kind of _annoying_ , and Vash always found some satisfaction in poking at the thing he was convinced was roiling beneath Roderich’s rehearsed placidity, whether it achieved results or not.

It didn’t. The efforts had been in vain, ultimately, and as they were preparing to graduate Roderich had gone and done something _way_ more stupid than Vash actually believed him capable of: he got engaged. To a woman. And—

—Vash dragged himself back into the present as his brain began down a path he was not remotely interested in indulging.

So, if his old roommate had been more than a little repressed, the Roderich that was sitting on the other side of Ludwig now was… well, there was really just one way of putting it.

Roderich Edelstein was gay.

 _So_ gay.

Vash had never really bought into the idea of “gaydar,” or whatever, but he wouldn’t have needed it to draw the conjecture, now, since it was just so plainly apparent. He saw it in the delicate pattern embroidered onto Roderich’s socks, first, and then in the cut of his impeccably tailored slacks and apparently-designer jacket (so, okay, still rich too), and then in the deep coif of his hair (which was kind of the same as it had always been, but now, like, _fluffier_ , or something). But more than that, Vash saw it in his gait and posture and disposition and voice—because each one came across so natural and unpracticed and unrestrained in some indescribable way, a way Vash wasn’t sure he would have been able to even imagine the existence of before that moment. And so altogether, Roderich of 2011 looked… looked…

Yeah. Just _really_ gay.

“—not trying to ignore you, Vash.” The direct address shook him from his internal monologue.

“Ah, sorry.” _Idiot_ —had he been staring? God forbid. “What did you say?”

Ludwig gave him a funny look. “We were just talking about work. But we don’t mean to be rude—tell us how you’re liking New York so far. You’ve never been, right?”

As Ludwig asked the question, a waitress came and set a dish in front of each of them. The German turned to her and asked whether Antonio was working, to which she replied that no, he wouldn’t be in until later that evening. He thanked her, shrugged, and then turned back to hear Vash’s answer.

“Right, never.” Vash skewered a shrimp on the end of his fork, coaxed some rice and vegetables on top, and tried to recall what he had been doing these past few weeks. “I like it, I think. It’s really…” He shrugged, failing to find the correct adjective in the correct language to describe it. “Just really, uh, American. I guess.”

“ _Ja_ ,” Ludwig nodded, a hint of a smile on his face. “I think there’s always an adjustment when someone moves here, even from—”

He was cut off by a sputtering to his left; Roderich had apparently aspirated his first mouthful of food, and he gave several violent coughs trying to clear the obstruction in his windpipe. Ludwig clapped him sharply on the back, and, eyes watering behind his glasses, Roderich spoke.

“Christ, pardon—‘ _moves_ ’? You’re _moving_?” He clutched one hand to his chest and coughed once more into the other. “ _Here?_ ”

“Um.” Vash tried to communicate to Ludwig with only his eyes that this information probably could have been delivered more gently. “Yes?”

Roderich stared at him as if he were staring at a severed limb, took a long drink of water, and then pasted a disturbingly magnanimous smile on his face.

“Ah. Well, that’s…” He clapped his hands together and wrung them until his knuckles were white. “Um—”

At an apparent loss for English words, he turned to Ludwig and addressed him in rapid German.

“ _Sorry, could you not have given me some warning about literally_ any _part of this situation?_ ” The pleasant tone grated very badly against the words. “ _I mean you_ do _remember, don’t you? You were_ there _, when he—_ ”

And then Roderich glanced at Vash again, and froze like a child caught stealing candy.

Vash didn’t feel it was particularly incumbent upon him to respond to that, so he dug around for another shrimp in his bowl instead, doing his best not to make direct eye contact with either of the two people who were now staring at him.

“Uh, he just—” Ludwig broke first, _so_ painfully, when Roderich proved either unable or unwilling to do it himself. “—sorry, no—” Both his and Roderich’s complexions were quite red, though Vash was sure his own was as well. “He’s—we’re just used to the people we get lunch with—”

“Yeah. Not knowing German. I get it.” It would’ve been a rude thing to do whether or not Vash knew German, by his own estimation, but it wasn’t like he could have expected Roderich to react much differently, really.

It wasn’t like Roderich hadn’t voiced the thing all three of them were probably thinking anyway.

“Well,” Roderich said after a moment, apparently now under the impression that his faux pas indicated equal responsibility to recover the situation. “So- _o_ …” It was desperately awkward, watching him try to decide how to proceed. He blinked and shook his head slightly. “Wh-where are you living, then?”

Oh, good, they were just pretending like nothing happened. A little voice in Vash’s brain pointed out that this was probably fitting, for Roderich—and he muffled it quickly, feeling a twinge of guilt for even being able to harbor something like that anymore.

So, pretend like nothing happened. Easy.

“Uh—” Vash glanced at Ludwig to acknowledge that they’d already had this conversation once. “I’m not sure yet, actually. Lilli and I are staying at a place on thirty-seventh and Lexington right now, but we’re looking for something more permanent.”

Roderich wrinkled his nose at the window. “Midtown?” he murmured.

He made a second attempt with his lunch, and was only one bite further when he looked back, suddenly inspired.

“Actually, I think Francis has a friend who’s trying to rent a place in Gramercy Park. Maybe you’d be interested? I mean, it would be a bit of a walk to NYU, and it depends where you’re working, obviously—” His expression shifted slightly. ”Where are you working?”

Vash could actually _see_ the gears turning inside of Ludwig’s head at that question.

“Well—Vash, do you mind if I tell him?”

 _Easy_ , was the word that occurred to Vash again _._ “Go ahead.”

Roderich looked between them with narrowed eyes. “I admit, this is starting to feel a little bit conspiratorial.”

Ludwig looked altogether much too pleased over the whole setup.

“Well, _Herr_ Edelstein,” he said, and he kept a remarkably even expression for a voice that sounded like it wanted nothing more than to be smiling deviously (though Vash could not actually picture Ludwig smiling deviously), “I think I’ve finally found a senior architect who will be to your liking.”

It was a good thing Roderich wasn’t in the middle of a mouthful of food that time, or he certainly would have suffocated. Instead, Vash watched his expression go blank as he realized what Ludwig was suggesting, watched him chew on the inside of his cheek for a moment, watched his fingers curl and uncurl, once, and then twice, and then a third time.

“Oh.” He looked at Ludwig. “I mean—” He looked at Vash. “I see what you’re—” He looked back at Ludwig. “I mean, _yes_ , but let me—” He stood up. “Just give me a—” He swallowed hard. “Sorry, I actually have a—have to get a call—Ludwig, can you get a box for—I’ll pay you back, sorry—”

As Roderich all but sprinted out of El Tomate Verde, Vash got the sudden impression that perhaps the darker-haired third of their old trio should be getting an EKG. Or maybe it was just all the coffee. Actually, he wasn’t sure if that mattered.

The weight of his departure hung around the remaining two for a very long moment.

“Well.” Vash hoped his cringe was coming across as good-natured rather than put out. “I think I will not cancel the other interviews I scheduled for this week, then.”

Ludwig shrugged, still looking mildly humored, himself. “I don’t know, that’s probably the most positive reaction he’s had to anyone so far. Usually it’s an immediate ‘no.’”

They finished their lunches mostly in silence, with a passing comment about something Vash wasn’t really paying attention to here and there, and when they were done Ludwig dutifully asked for a box for Roderich’s food. When the check came Ludwig took it at once—he was happy to pick it up, he said, it was no problem. “ _Einfach_ ,” he said.

 _Easy_. Never one to pass up a free meal, Vash let him.

“So,” Ludwig began as they left the restaurant, “I think we’ll need to have an interview, just to, you know, formalize things.” Vash found himself caught off-guard at… well, at how _easy_ he made the whole thing sound. “But as long as Roderich comes around, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be a natural fit—and assuming you’re interested, of course?”

“If he is, I am.” Or at least, he was pretty sure—

“Good. This week is a little packed for us, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, but maybe…” Ludwig paused as he scrolled through his phone. “Friday afternoon? Four o’clock?”

And that was that, apparently. They exchanged ‘ _Bis nächstes Mal_ ’s and shook hands—Vash thanked God and the universe that it didn’t turn into another weird hug like it had that morning—and Ludwig headed back up to his office while Vash triangulated, trying to decide if it was better to take Broadway or West Broadway to get to Washington Square Park, trying to remember what the difference was in the first place.

He made his way back toward the part of New York City that he hadn’t been best friends with a decade ago, unsure whether doing so was a small disappointment, or a great relief.

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It had been a while since Vash needed to wear a suit multiple times a week, multiple weeks in a row. But as he walked along Duane Street on Friday afternoon, he was struck by the sense that—after the two years he’d spent in academia and remote freelancing, where dressing up looked like putting on anything other than sweatpants—he’d kind of missed it. Not that he was so thrilled about the series of job interviews that were giving him cause to dress up, really, but nonetheless there was something purposeful about it, something distinctly productive.

And not to brag, but as a bonus—he glanced at his profile reflected in a half-silvered storefront window—he _did_ look pretty good in a suit.

As Vash approached the building that housed Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy Architects, he tried to remember what other interviews he’d been to since seeing Ludwig on Tuesday (he’d kept them all, despite Ludwig’s confidence in this one), but found it difficult to remember what things he’d talked about and who he’d met in which place, and harder still to care. As he buzzed up to the third floor, he tried to conjure up the little pit of nervous energy in his stomach that typically preceded events like job interviews, but found that it just wasn’t there. This _was_ only Ludwig, after all—well, and Francis and Gilbert, probably, but none of them were really that intimidating. It was hard to picture Ludwig as anything more than an old friend, and Gilbert as an old friend’s crazy brother, and Francis seemed essentially bearable, at first glance. He’d meet the architectural engineer, he supposed (what was his name again? _Scheisse_ ), but everyone talked about him like he was the sweetest person alive, so what kind of problem could _that_ be?

The lock clicked open, and Vash entered 171 Duane Street for the second time that week.

Up two flights of stairs and on the left, the office was accessible via a simple, frosted glass door with a modest vinyl appliqué of the company’s logotype, set at eye-level. It was a rational, tasteful entrance—a good start. Not a door Vash would mind seeing on a regular basis, if he were being preemptive about the whole thing.

Beyond the door was a wide-open, extensively-renovated space—the third story of the building—segmented by massive concrete columns that soared up to striking double-vaulted ceilings. The interior was bright and industrial, with white-washed brick walls and pale, wide-plank hardwood floors, and sunlight streamed in through three rows of large arched windows at the front. The front half of the space was well-appointed to entertain, with scale models of past projects showcased between Miesian seating arrangements and framed photographs of various buildings on the walls, all flattered by the abundant natural light. The back half of the floor, where the upper stories fractioned off the vertical rise, was split into the workshop that the model fabricator Alfred oversaw, a series of offices that belonged to the various editorial and IT staff, as well as a small kitchen. A wide staircase with a stylish steel-and-glass profile climbed up the side wall to connect each floor to the others, and Vash knew from his first visit earlier in the week that it boasted an excellent view.

“Oh, hi! I remember you!”

Directly past the door was a desk behind which the young secretary sat, conveniently able to observe everything and everyone who passed through.

“Hi,” Vash said back. “Yes—I’m here to see Ludwig again. At four.” He glanced at his watch. Three fifty-nine. “And probably also Francis and Gilbert, I guess.”

“Mmhmm…” Raivis trained his attention back on his monitor. “It looks like Ludwig and Francis were in a meeting uptown earlier, but I’m not sure that they’re back quite yet—”

“They’re not.” A familiar voice sounded from up the staircase, and Vash turned toward it, only to see an entirely unfamiliar face. Descending from the fourth floor was a very tall man—maybe even taller than Ludwig—with a short tuft of sandy hair, narrow glasses, and a stiff posture and austere expression that seemed disinviting of any sort of contradiction. Were Vash a lesser man he might have called the overall effect intimidating, but more pressing was his struggle to resolve the apparent disconnect between the voice and the person—until Roderich Edelstein came into view as well.

It seemed that since Tuesday Roderich had recovered some of the dignity that Vash was accustomed to interacting with—or remembered being accustomed to, was probably more accurate—and the Austrian architect offered an elegant, poised counterpoint to the stoic man he walked alongside. He did not seem particularly self-conscious over the prospect of intruding on the exchange at the front desk.

“Ludwig just texted me and said traffic is horrible, but they’re on the way,” he elaborated, and offered a small wave in Vash’s direction. Neither quite managed a smile. “Ten minutes, maybe.”

And without further ado, Roderich and the person he was with made their way toward the back of the third floor and disappeared into one of the offices.

Vash’s brain made an entirely unauthorized remark to itself that there was some very real possibility that he might have been standing in place of whoever that man was, if not for— _oh no no no you will_ not _go there right now_ —and, ah. Yes. _There_ was that stomach-turning feeling he was having trouble remembering earlier.

“Okay, well, feel free to have a seat—” Raivis gestured to the area behind the front desk. “Do you want any water? Tea, coffee…?”

It took a moment to register the question—“Oh—no, thanks. I’m alright.”—and then he sat down and waited.

Contrary to his typical feelings about punctuality, the fact that Vash’s interviewers were running late was a rather welcome delay, in that it bought him a few extra minutes to clear his mind of the possibility that this whole thing was maybe really not such a good idea. He feigned interest in the various architectural publications that populated the coffee table in front of the sofa he sat on, but focused instead on what type of small talk he was going to have to conjure out of himself to make it comfortably through the billionth interview he’d had in the past few weeks. The small talk was always the worst part, and he wasn’t any good at it to begin with, and the whole international-background-thing was already common knowledge to today’s interviewers so he was running low on ideas.

Luckily, said interviewers ended up basically taking care of it for him. When the faces of Ludwig Beilschmidt and Francis Bonnefoy appeared through the door, fifteen minutes behind schedule, they were a flurry of apologies and lamentations over the traffic on Park Avenue at this time of afternoon and insistences that they would have been fine but the meeting ran late because one executive couldn’t shut his mouth about what Tequila to serve at the ribbon-cutting party that was still eight months away and complaints that the taxi driver would just _not_ hurry—so Vash made it to the fifth floor without having to say much of anything at all.

It was into Ludwig’s office, then, and when Gilbert joined them Vash was reminded that his memories of the elder Beilschmidt brother were indeed outdated. Gilbert still _looked_ kind of crazy, just by virtue of his albinism (and yes, Vash did realize that was not a very polite thing to think about someone) but the overall level of it was definitely tempered by the button-down and slacks. Probably also by the fact that he didn’t look like he was high, which could not be said for the first time they’d met. It surprised him, just a little, when Gilbert greeted him genially, like they were as close as Vash had once been with his younger brother. It surprised him, just a little more, that Gilbert had remembered who he was at all.

Lud had probably prepped him.

“So you’ve spoken with Constance by now, yes?” The first bit of small talk that he had to engage with was Francis’s inquiry about the apartment, which was easy enough when he could just tell the truth.

Per Roderich’s tip-off earlier that week, Vash had received an email on Tuesday night from Francis Bonnefoy himself, sending the contact information of a friend who was having trouble finding someone to occupy a condominium she owned in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, and noting that she was expecting him to reach out. Vash was prepared to be suspicious about just _why_ this condo was proving so hard to rent, when Francis sent one more email alerting him that _oh by the way she speaks very little English so she’s looking for a tenant who speaks French_.

At thirty years old, this might’ve been the first time that being proficient in French was anything other than a complete waste of his brain-space since he’d moved away from Switzerland, so all hesitation was washed away quite efficiently.

“Yeah, the apartment is nice.” Vash ran a hand across the back of his neck as he thought about the early 20th-century architectural detailing on the building’s exterior and the well-preserved ceramic tiling of the kitchen backsplash and bathroom floor. He tried not to think about the price tag—it wasn’t like anything else was cheaper, anyway. “We’re signing all the paperwork tomorrow and moving in on Sunday.”

Francis nodded, pleased. “ _Tres bien_ , all she told me was that a very cute Swissman and his very cute sister looked at the place, and so that left me guessing which cute Swissman—” He winked; Vash felt his face flush. “—she could possibly be referring to.”

Before he could decide exactly what the hell _that_ meant, and what the hell someone should say to something like that while in a _job interview_ , Gilbert smacked Francis on the arm and grinned in Vash’s direction. Ludwig just rolled his eyes. He slid a pair of reading glasses onto his nose and scanned a copy of Vash’s resume.

“Okay, can we start by hearing a little bit about what you were doing for your PhD?”

**: : :  
** **: : :**

An hour-and-a-half later, Vash stepped out of Ludwig’s office and closed the door with a sigh. Unsolicited flirtation aside, things had gone smoothly, as far as he could tell. The conversation was about as relaxed as was possible for an interview, flitting easily between topics and speakers and balancing appropriate seriousness with comfortable levity. There’d been much back-and-forth about what kind of work he’d been up to since school, naturally, and he tried not to sound too dogmatic when asserting the groundbreaking importance of his doctoral dissertation and tried not to sound too unenthusiastic about the freelancing he’d done at the same time (not that it mattered, he’d already called it ’stupid’ in front of Ludwig, and it really had been). He threw in some well-placed words about wanting to be engaging with projects at more of their stages instead of focusing on just one piece of multiple projects—which was partially why he’d left IDA—and they’d made light conversation about which star-chitects were more obnoxious, settling with rapid consensus on Johnson. Vash figured this was satisfactorily consistent with the business’s modernist ethos.

For all the conversation flowed easily and the priorities seemed to align, he stepped out of the office feeling a little uncertain about the whole thing, and his uncertainty might have stemmed from the one answer he hadn’t quite gotten—the one question he wasn’t quite willing to ask—though the instruction he’d been sent out with did allow for a guess.

Vash made his way back down to the fourth floor, feeling vaguely like this was the most testing portion of the interview so far. He stuck his head around the corner of the wall of bookshelves that separated the majority of the floor from three desks: one occupied by the resident senior architect, another by that tall blond man who Vash now gathered was probably the Swedish engineer, and a vacant third which may or may not imminently belong to himself.

“Uh, Roderich—” Even as he tried to lower it, his voice felt terribly loud against the silent working atmosphere. Both of the people sitting there looked up when he spoke. Roderich pulled an earbud away from one ear.

“Do they want me upstairs?” he asked, and then turned back to his computer and continued to type. Vash gave a word of confirmation to the back of his head.

“Okay, let me just…” he murmured distractedly, still facing his computer. “Because half my job these days is writing fucking emails…”

Vash watched him finish what he was doing, and at the same moment Roderich’s finger connected with the computer mouse to hit ‘send’ the telephone on each of the occupied desks rang. Roderich jumped a little in his chair before looking over at it.

“Fuck,” he sighed. Vash couldn’t recall Roderich ever having such a mouth—though in all fairness, being a doctoral student had probably incubated his share of unsavory linguistic habits, as well. “Berwald, I forgot to call him back earlier, can you tell him to text me if it’s urgent?”

Right. Berwald. That was his name. Berwald nodded as he picked up the phone, and answered in a deep baritone.

“’Lo, Yao.”

Roderich disappeared around the corner, leaving Vash with the sudden realization that he had no idea what he was supposed to do while he waited, nor any idea of how long he should expect to be waiting for. He stood there and looked around for a moment, trying not to come across as nosy while also making an effort not to look bored, and while Berwald spoke with the person apparently called Yao on the phone Vash’s mind wandered toward the absent subject of the other desk.

He hadn’t quite given any thought to whether he expected Roderich to be amenable to this whole ‘working together’ thing, after their unfortunate lunch the other day, and he realized maybe he should’ve. Like, was this _weird_ , being in the space that Roderich worked? Particularly given that the last time he’d been in Roderich’s workspace it had also been his, and also their shared home? And they hadn’t been speaking for a week and they never actually said, like, goodbye to one another?

Okay, _obviously_ it was weird when he put it like that, yes, but it had been seven years, right? That was plenty of time to… erm… well, this wasn’t really the ideal word choice, but plenty of time to, um, _move on_.

Right?

Right.

Anyway, there wasn’t much to be done at this point, and he’d been requested by the three men upstairs to wait while they spoke with Senior Architect Number One, so here he was—standing awkwardly in the little alcove behind Berwald, trying to keep his mind occupied with anything other than the types of memories that being in this space was bringing up, and trying to look like he was paying attention to anything other than the content of their computers.

NDAs and all, you know.

He was attempting to get a better read on the occupant of each desk by noting the way their respective surfaces were organized (Roderich’s bare of anything that might be considered ‘sentimental’, but with a healthy level of presumably work-related clutter, including three used-looking coffee mugs; Berwald’s quite tidy with only a notepad, pen, and framed picture of something Vash couldn’t see without leaning in for a better look)—when suddenly Berwald hung up the phone, jotted a few words down onto the notepad, and then swiveled his chair around to level two stern eyes at Vash himself.

Okay, so maybe a _little_ intimidating, then.

“D’ya need somethin’?”

That wasn’t a particularly warm welcome, but then, Vash _was_ in his office.

“Uh—no. I was just told to wait while they talked to Roderich, upstairs.” The excuse somehow felt woefully inadequate for the circumstance, but Berwald nodded and gestured to the empty chair.

“Then sit down, if y’wanna.”

His accent was very thick, and the intonation of his voice completely flat, which made it difficult to tell what he might have actually been thinking.

But if one thing was certain, it was that Vash was emphatically _not_ interested in sitting down in Roderich Edelstein’s desk chair.

“Uh, no, that’s fine. I think I’ll sit out by the cutting table.”

Berwald didn’t say anything. Shit. Was he offended? He looked like he maybe could be, but it was hard to tell, actually—had his expression changed at all since he’d turned around?

Vash backed out of the space anyway, rounded the corner and sat down at the stool Roderich might’ve been sitting at the other day, and he tried to distract himself from that fact and from everything else by getting a better look at the fourth floor.

Roderich and Berwald’s alcove took up the rightmost portion of the space, so the main, center area was bordered by the bookshelves on that side (and Vash didn’t have to inspect them to know what likely made up a great majority of the content). The staircase’s landing hit right at the center of the length of the space, and further toward the back wall was the cutting table where Vash was sitting now, flanked on the left by a towering stack of flat files marked with archiving numbers and dates, and a large-format laser printer. On the other side was the staircase that ascended toward the fifth floor, beneath which a narrow hallway led to what Vash figured was probably a restroom.

On the far left side of the space was a frosted glass door nested in a frosted glass wall that cordoned off—as Ludwig had pointed out to him earlier in the week—the conference room, equipped with a long table and chairs, dual monitors, and a separate coat rack.

It was all nice—really nice, obviously planned with a great deal of care and executed with the quality that would be demanded by a posse of architectural devotees. And _God_ , Vash thought, the lease on a space like this must cost no small fortune, if the prices for a measly pre-war one-bedroom apartment on the east side were anything to go on. For that matter, Vash wondered, had they been in this space the whole time? Had it even been Roderich and Ludwig overseeing the renovations? And most importantly, how on Earth had it been paid for? Could it have been bankrolled by Roderich’s—

“—parents wouldn’t know a cabernet from a zinfandel if it was literally a matter of life or death,” came the voice of Roderich himself, descending the stairs. “I mean they’re wonderful people, don’t get me wrong, but—” He emerged on the landing and glanced over toward Vash, turned heel, and kept talking as he approached.

“Okay, I have no idea if Sonoma or Napa is better for a twenty five-year wedding anniversary, we’ll have to figure it out later—look, this isn’t why I called you, I need to—”

Vash wasn’t sure why he felt the strong urge to bolt as Roderich closed in, but he gripped the sides of the chair just in case his subconscious tried to make him do something uncharacteristically rash. Roderich stood in front of him as he finished speaking into the phone, head dipping first to the left and then to the right like he’d rather look at _anything_ but Vash, and Vash wondered for his own part if he could really see himself tolerating this level of awkwardness for eight hours a day, five days a week, for the foreseeable future.

“—right, I’ll text you in a minute, but if you could talk to one of your friends and try to—obviously, but by the windows at the front—for six thirty, probably? Not later than seven. But look, I really have to go—okay, yes, you too—Vash, hi—”

The last words of the call, pocketing his phone, and addressing the blond in question all seemed to happen in one seamless motion, and Vash was not immediately certain what sort of response that called for. Fortunately, Roderich didn’t hesitate to fill the ensuing silence.

“Ludwig wants to have dinner tonight, with Francis, and Berwald if he’s available, would you be interested?” He waved a hand back toward the landing. “We’d leave in a few minutes, just whenever they bother to come downstairs.”

“Uh—”Vash’s brain chose this convenient moment to take stock of the fact that in the seven years since they’d last seen one another, he’d never actually met anyone else who spoke quite like Roderich. His voice was still tinted with that uniquely posh Viennese lilt, the accent still placeable even in his English speech.

Vash cleared his throat and looked at the wall, which was thankfully less familiar. “Sure. I can go. I mean I’ll have to tell Lilli that I won’t—”

“Lilli’s welcome too, of course,” Roderich said quickly. He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, a little stiffly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

And he turned around walked toward his desk.

Vash leaned into the cutting table and texted his sister.

**: : :  
** **: : :**

Which, ultimately, was how Vash ended up in the West Village (per Ludwig’s identification), standing outside of some buzzy restaurant that Francis had made a point to emphasize was the premiere spot to see celebrities in their natural habitat, if you were into that sort of thing. Vash wasn’t, and he wasn’t surprised when he glanced around and didn’t recognize any faces, but he glanced around for Francis’s sake anyway.

In the end it was just Francis, Ludwig, Roderich, and himself that had gone from Beilschmidt & Bonnefoy. Vash had tried to tell himself that Berwald wasn’t passing on the offer because of him, since he didn’t seem terrifically social to begin with, but he wasn’t entirely convinced.

Also present was Lilli, who had arrived a few minutes before them, waiting on the sidewalk outside as they all got out of the cab they’d crammed into.

“Your _hair_!” Roderich was the first one to get a word in to her because he’d insisted on taking the front seat and therefore didn’t have to untangle his legs or his seatbelt from anyone else’s in order to make it out the door. Lilli brightened in recognition toward his voice as he continued, “Last time I saw you it practically went down to your _knees_ —”

And Vash was sure he’d known that they would remember each other, perhaps even fondly (certainly more so than he and Roderich did themselves, anyway), but even so—watching as they hugged warmly, lamenting how many years they’d been out of touch—it all might’ve made him a little dizzy to watch.

Nevertheless, everyone got acquainted and friendly on the sidewalk and then made their way into the restaurant. They were seated at their table which, Vash noted, was indeed by the windows in the front, though he still wasn’t entirely sure how that may or may not have related to a twenty five-year wedding anniversary or California wine country—

“Hey!”

At the sound of a greeting that Vash might not have otherwise distinguished from the general din of the dinner crowd, Roderich looked up, and he cocked his head pleasantly, a small smile lighting up his features.

Vash craned his neck back to see an unfamiliar person walking toward them. The guy looked oddly casual for the establishment they were in, wearing tight black jeans with a hole in one knee and a chain against the other hip, a chunky knit sweater that was quite oversized (though intentional-looking, if Vash could claim any expertise on that matter), and a beanie over his black hair. Vash’s first impression of the guy was that, despite blatantly disregarding the unspoken dress code of this establishment, he actually looked pretty fucking stylish doing it, and it vaguely made Vash want to loosen the tie around his neck.

And he sat there wondering who this hipster-looking guy coming toward them was until he scooted past Ludwig into the booth and sidled up next to Roderich and—

Ah.

—kissed him squarely on the cheek.

“What’s good, Roddy?” Vash’s second impression of the guy was just _loud_. “Sorry I’m late, the L is a complete clusterfuck, signal problems or some shit. I had to walk all the way to the M instead. How was the animal factory today?”

“Completely animalistic, as ever,” Roderich replied mildly as he scooted over to make room for another body and adjusted his glasses with one hand. “How was the soup kitchen?”

“Oh, wow, that’s a new one—hey, Fran—”

As this guy hung off Roderich’s waist and greeted each person at the table, Vash was acutely reminded of just how long seven years was to be absent from a life.

The guy paused when his eyes landed on Vash and Lilli.

Ludwig spoke first: “This is Vash, from Basel—”

“Bern.”

Everyone’s attention shifted in unison as the correction was issued not from Vash’s mouth, but from Roderich’s. He looked over at Ludwig incredulously, but when he realized that everyone else was staring at _him_ he pursed his lips quickly, a pink tinge growing across his cheeks.

Ludwig cleared his throat and continued. “Of course, sorry—and his sister, Lilli. Vash went to school with Roderich and I.”

The guy stuck a hand out over the table with a sparkling grin. “Sadiq. I don’t actually work at a soup kitchen, for what it’s worth.” He waved a hand over his shoulder. “I bartend at the sister restaurant to this place. Can I ask, though—is this table really big enough for _another_ blond architect?”

Vash’s third impression was that actually, if he were forced to have an opinion on the matter, Sadiq seemed exactly like Roderich’s type.

And so it went from there. Between the first glass of wine and the arrival of their food, the conversation meandered around trivialities like the seemingly oxymoronic fact of above-ground subways—of which Vash and Lilli were not yet aware and which Sadiq assured were not as glamorous as they sounded—and then the pros and cons of commuting on public transit in general, and then the pros and cons of owning a car in a city like this one and subsequently the pros and cons of living in a city where owning a car was a stupid idea, like this one.

“To be fair,” Ludwig said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “Roderich thinks owning a car is stupid anywhere, because he’s a terrible driver.” Roderich shot him a glare while Sadiq and Francis cackled. Do you drive, Vash?”

Roderich cleared his throat pointedly before Vash had a chance to speak, which earned him another collective look from the rest of the table.

Vash, for his own part, swallowed a mouthful of the French onion soup that had just been set in front of him, and tried to answer as if it hadn’t happened.

“Of course, yeah. I had this little Peugeot in Hamburg, but I sold it when we moved to Rotterdam because we could bike everywhere—but I can still drive, I mean, it’s not like I forgot.” He nudged his sister and felt himself smile a little at the memory as he retold it. “I just finished teaching Lil, too. I’m not sure how many of those car shares we had to go through to get manual shifting down, but it’s a good thing we left the country when we did.”

Lilli grinned back. She’d been mostly quiet through the conversation—which was fine, she’d always been a bit shy—but she perked up then, and added that she and Vash were both rushing to get American driver’s licenses within the window of time they still had.

“How long were you living in Rotterdam, then?” Roderich asked politely, and mostly to Lilli.

She answered that it had been about two years, while Vash went back to school. At the rising curiosity on Roderich’s face, Ludwig intervened.

“So, he’s got a PhD,” he said to Roderich, “and he doesn’t even want to teach.”

Roderich laughed a little, though it sounded forced, and nodded in Vash’s direction. “That’s… somehow very like you.”

Vash wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed the expression that Sadiq made then, suddenly looking from him toward Roderich and then back, lips rounding into a small ‘o’ shape and eyebrows rising on his forehead. He tried not to think too hard about it as Roderich partially succeeded in pivoting.

“Anyway, it’s funny, I was in Amsterdam for work in the spring. I actually flew into The Hague, though, so that must’ve been pretty close.”

Their eyes met briefly and Vash just as quickly tore his away, definitely _not_ interested in considering any close brushes with this person.

“Well, if you were in Amsterdam you saw the nice part, anyway,” he replied. “Rotterdam isn’t nearly as quaint.” ****

“Speaking of quaint,” Sadiq cut in, “have you seen those protests downtown?” ****

“Ah, yes, of course,” Francis answered first. He turned to Vash. “It’s lucky our meeting wasn’t on Wednesday, because traffic was interrupted even all the way up on Duane Street.”

Ludwig nodded. “I could actually hear them when I got in this morning, it’s that loud. I can’t imagine how loud it is down by the Stock Exchange.” The naming of the place sparked something in Vash’s memory.

“Actually,” he said, “I think I saw something like that last weekend, when I was walking around kind of by Battery Park.”

“Yeah, you probably did,” Sadiq confirmed. “It’s a bunch of like, old hippies and college student anarchists. They’ve been out there for a whole week now, got an encampment set up at Zucotti Park and everything—”

“Well, I support it,” Roderich said suddenly. He shrugged into the following silence and gave an uppity sort of sniff. “I mean, you won’t find me sleeping out in the street, obviously, but I think it’s good that people are taking a stand for something.”

Sadiq glanced at him sideways. “You just want to stay on their good side because when they say ‘eat the rich,’ you know that _you’re_ the rich they’re talking about.”

Even Lilli had to stifle a giggle at that.

“So, Vash-from-Bern,” Sadiq continued, gesturing loosely between Roderich and Ludwig, but looking very pointedly at Vash himself. “It sounds like you were pretty good friends with these two in college. So I can’t imagine why I’ve never heard of you?”

**: : :  
** **: : :**

_The announcement came without warning, two days before the start of their exit exams and one week before they were slated to be handed their diplomas and graduate. It came as Vash and Lilli and Ludwig and Roderich sat out on the campus lawn and relished in a brief moment of relaxation before their last big push to the end, before their departure from the cradle of academia and emergence into the rest of their lives._

_“I’m getting married.”_

_The announcement came with so little fanfare that it might have just been a spring evening’s breeze, had the words not rang out clearly, unmistakably, on the precipice of the future._

_The future folded like a piece of paper right in front of Vash’s eyes._

_“Is that why you’ve been acting so weird lately?” were the words he could scrape together—a question he’d been asking himself all semester, suddenly compelled to verbalize it._

_“I haven’t been acting weird lately,” Roderich snapped, too quickly, too obviously, and Vash felt something inside of him snap too, when he realized Roderich was entirely serious._

**: : :  
** **: : :**

In all honesty, Vash had never had much of a poker face.

“We, um...” Especially not for _this_ , as he suddenly realized that he’d never once, in the better part of a decade spent working in Hamburg and studying in Rotterdam, needed to come up with a euphemism for this. “Well, we were—I mean, yeah, the plan had been for all three of us to...”

“We just drifted apart,” Roderich interjected sharply, a tight smile pasted on his face.

Roderich was a better liar than Vash by a long shot, Vash knew, but it seemed the fact of the lie was lost on no one anyway—not Ludwig nor Lilli, of course, and Francis could certainly read the room, if his expression was any indication. But it was particularly not lost on Sadiq, who looked back and forth between them again with some dangerous smile dawning on his face—and this time everyone _definitely_ noticed.

The couple at the table next to them glanced over, voyeurs to the vacuum of silence that followed the flimsy explanation.

“Well then,” Sadiq finally said with a glint in his eye and a curl in his lip. “Isn’t it nice that you’ve… drifted back together?”

**: : :  
** **: : :**

_Maybe he should’ve known this was coming._

_Maybe some part of him did._

_Maybe that was the pit in his stomach that had been eating away at him since the summer, the longest time he and Roderich had spent apart in all five years of knowing each other. Maybe it was knowing who was at his house all summer instead._

_Which was kind of the same thing as knowing the answer to the question of “who,” even as he asked it._

_And knowing this feeling, this free fall, this hole that only five years ago he’d promised himself he’d never fall into again. Kicking it back, as hard as he could._

_And knowing the answer to the paralyzing decision he’d been faced with for the past two weeks, previously impossible but now, in the suffocating space between the sky and the lawn, brutally simple._

_“The wedding is a week after we graduate—”_

_“I’m leaving the day after we graduate.”_

_And knowing, as he walked away from his two bewildered best friends, that those were the last words he would ever say to Roderich Edelstein._

**: : :  
** **: : :**

Vash nodded only because he didn’t really have an answer, didn’t really have any English adjective in his vocabulary to describe quite what it was like to accidentally reinsert himself into the life of the person who, seven years ago, had actually really broken his heart.

He might not have had a word for it in _any_ language.

So it was disturbingly telepathic that Sadiq chose to continue his interrogation in precisely that vein. ****

“So, you’re Swiss,” he said, with a nonchalance that Vash was quickly coming to distrust. “Do you speak a lot of languages? Is that just a stereotype?”

“Well—” And Vash figured he’d play along, if only because he really had no other choice. “—most Swiss people only speak one or two languages, but I happened to learn a few because I grew up in a German city, and my parents taught university English and French.”

“Taught?” Sadiq asked, and Roderich stiffened visibly next to him. “So they’re retired now?”

Roderich suddenly jerked in his seat and at nearly the same moment Sadiq flinched badly away from him with a yelp. He mouthed the word “ow” as he shot a glare at Roderich, who returned it from behind a clenched jaw.

Vash sighed inwardly and steeled himself to answer, because, yeah, he’d never been a good liar.

“They’re dead, actually.”

“Oh.” Sadiq blinked. He glanced at Roderich again briefly. “Uh, sorry, I—“

“Whatever,” Vash waved it away. “It was a long time ago.”

That finally seemed to shut Sadiq up, which Vash wanted to appreciate. But in reality this was always the worst part, this need to have some prepared nonchalance over the fact for everyone else’s comfort. Not that he was going to get upset over it, or something, because it really wasn’t like that—just… it was just _easier_ , for everyone, if it didn’t come up at all.

Particularly given the way Roderich was looking at him now, eyes practically burning a hole in him.

If there was one person’s pity he did _not_ want right now, or ever, it was Roderich’s.

Lilli grabbed his hand under the table. He gave it a squeeze, thankful that squeezing someone’s hand didn’t make any noise in the face of the incredible silence that stretched over the entire table.

The second worst thing, Vash thought, was the fact that now it was his responsibility to recover the mood.

At least he hadn’t had to expend all of his small-talk energy earlier.

“So… they’re building Renzo Piano’s plans for the Whitney Museum, right? Isn’t that just down the street? I met him once, at some conference in Milan….”

**: : :  
** **: : :**

Early Saturday afternoon, five minutes before Vash needed to begin walking down to Gramercy Park to sign a lease written in French—and then the copy of it that he himself had translated into English—his phone rang. He recognized the phone number immediately (though he wasn’t quite ready to relegate it to the status of ‘named contact’ yet), and it indicated to him with very little doubt what those next five minutes were about to entail.

The dinner conversation from the night before nipped at his heels, and he thought briefly about just letting it go to voicemail, but he knew better than to pass this up.

“Vash Zwingli speaking.”

 _“Vash, it’s Ludwig.”_ He knew it was Ludwig. _“Sorry to call you on a Saturday, but I think you’ll want to hear this.”_

He almost didn’t want to hear it. But he knew better.

“No problem, go ahead.”

_“Well, we want you at B &B—no surprises there, obviously. Can you start on Monday? Gilbert will get you on the payroll and we’ll set up your software licensing and everything first thing in the morning.”_

No surprises, huh? And he almost wanted to say…

No. No, he knew better.

“That’s great, Ludwig—really great, thanks. I’ll be in at nine on Monday.”

 _“Excellent,”_ his former-friend-and-now-employer’s voice said brightly. _“We’re glad to have you. See you Monday.”_

After hanging up, Vash figured that securing an apartment and a job in New York City in the span of an hour had to be a stroke of unrepeatable luck, and he hoped dearly that it would be the good kind.

**: : :  
** **: : :  
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**If you’ve made it this far, congratulations!** ****

**I’d already written most of these first three chapters before posting them, which is why I’ve been able to update with some frequency (by fanfic standards, anyway), but from here on out the update speed will slow down since I have much less of the writing done for the coming chapters (until we get to like 16, when the pace will pick back up again, because I’m essentially writing this story backwards). So thanks in advance for sticking around and being patient! Hopefully posting a chapter that nearly doubles the overall word count will help tide things over for now.**

**Now fasten your seatbelts; we’ve got a long way to go!**


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